In today’s business landscape, it is always best to leverage the right technology to get the most out of your business. Running a startup is not easy, and it always comes with its unique challenges. Leveraging the right technologies will make a difference in building and growing your startup. This is why a lot of startups choose Amazon Web Services.
AWS offers various services that help startups grow and scale quickly, innovate efficiently, and manage costs with little operational overhead. In this article, we will outline, and explain 5 AWS services that startups should consider in 2025 to make the most out of their business.
Amazon EC2
The Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute is one of Amazon’s flagship services that offers powerful cloud computing functionalities. If you run a startup, EC2 is useful for running applications, managing application workloads, and scaling without physical hardware.
EC2 has instance types tailored to serve your various workloads. The instance types include storage-optimised workloads, compute-optimised workloads, and memory-optimised workloads. As a startup owner, you can choose the type that matches your application environment to ensure cost efficiency and performance.
EC2 instances are scaleable as well. With the inclusion of Auto-scaling groups and Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove instances based on demand. For an online business, these features can help to handle traffic spikes during sensitive periods like feature launches, marketing campaign launches, or promo sales without manual intervention on the infrastructure.
You can configure EC2 instances with IAM (Identity and Access Management) for fine-grained access control and set it up on multiple availability zones. This ensures that your application remains secure and available, even during outages.
On the other hand, managing EC2 instances can be challenging for people who are unfamiliar with AWS compute infrastructure. It requires expertise to optimise, and configure, and if it is not properly managed, you may end up paying for what you did not use.
EC2 instances also require patching, updates, and monitoring to be handled by the users. So if you are a startup founder with little AWS experience, it may not be the right one for you.
AWS Lambda
If you run a business with limited resources and a constant need for agility, then AWS Lambda is your best bet. You can focus on writing and deploying code rather than managing the server infrastructure. This is one of the best choices if you need proper scaling and cost control.
AWS Lambda is an event-driven architecture. This means that functions are triggered by events from other services. These events may include DynamoDB changes, S3 uploads, and API requests.
The good part of AWS Lambda is that it scales with the number of incoming requests it receives, and for your startup, this can help it handle multiple requests without manual intervention.
You will be charged based on the number of requests it receives, and when your code doesn’t run, no charges are incurred. This helps you save money when there is low activity.
Lambda works with various programming languages like Python, Java, and Golang, so you can use the one you are familiar with, and deploy your applications quickly. If you want high availability, Lambda functions can be replicated across multiple availability zones to minimise downtime even when there is a failure in one zone.
On the other hand lambda functions usually experience data when they are invoked after being idle for a while. This may affect performance, especially for startup applications that need to be responsive.
Lambda also has a maximum execution timeout of 15 mins so if your application contains tasks that need to be running for longer, then this may not be the best option for you.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Elastic Beanstalk is a platform-as-a-service offering from AWS that helps startups simplify the deployments and operations of applications. There are several cases where startups face resource limitations and because of this, they need to focus more on product development rather than infrastructure management.
Elastic Beanstalk removes the complexities of managing servers, load-balancer, and scaling, and helps engineers focus on writing code. In Elastic Beanstalk, applications are deployed with pre-configured Elastic Load Balancer Auto scaling to prevent you from the complexities of managing infrastructure.
Elastic Beanstalk saves time, and effort in bringing out an infrastructure and you can use your preferred programming language or framework. With Elastic Beanstalk you can tailor your environment to meet your business needs.
Elastic Beanstalk is used for user-facing web applications, APIs, Backend for mobile applications, and micro-service architecture.
On the other hand, if you want to have some control over your infrastructure, then this may not be the right one for you. Also if your startup has a lot of complex setups, Elastic Beanstalks may not offer the right flexibility you may need. You may need to customise your resources manually which may take a lot of time.
Amazon RDS
RDS is often described as the Go-to Relational Database for Startups. It is a managed database solution that helps to simplify the deployment, and maintenance of relational databases. As a startup looking to scale quickly without thinking too much about database infrastructure, then RDS is the best option for you. It offers reliability, and flexibility to meet your database demands for your startup.
RDS handles tasks like provisioning, backups, patching, and hardware maintenance. This enables you to focus on development. It supports different relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Aurora. This helps you choose a Database that best supports your startup needs.
RDS also has Multi-AZ features and automatic scaling that ensure database updates during failures. This provides reliability to your users and adapts to workloads as it increases. RDS also comes with encryption at rest to help you protect sensitive data.
While RDS helps to support database management, you may not have as much control over the underlying infrastructure. If your startup requires a lot of database customisation, it may not be a good choice for your startup.
Amazon S3
It is the ultimate storage solution for your startup that provides you scaleable, and secure object storage for your startup needs.
S3 Buckets are used to host images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript files for your startup application. It is also useful to store backups for databases, for proper disaster recovery. If you want to deliver content globally to users, integrating S3 with CloudFront which is a Content Delivery Network will help in low-latency delivery.
With S3, you can store as much data as you need with no capacity limits. You can scale as the data grows from gigabytes to petabytes, and higher. S3 is designed for durability and this infrastructure ensures that your data is free from loss.
S3 has different storage classes that your startup can utilise depending on its needs. For proper cost-optimisation, you can use the S3 Standard for frequency access, and the S3 Glacier for Long Term Archival Storage.
For proper encryption, S3 also offers encryption at rest to help protect sensitive data and meet your startup’s compliance requirements. You can also implement event-driven workflows that trigger Lambda functions whenever objects are added or modified.
Finally, if you add different versions of one object into your bucket, S3 also has versioning features to help retain different versions of your objects and set lifecycle rules for proper object maintenance.
Conclusion
By incorporating any of the 5 AWS Services listed above, your startup can reduce the complexity of managing its infrastructure which helps you focus on building solid products and improve the overall customer experience. Whenever you are trying to scale infrastructure, store data or manage your running applications, utilising any of the services may be the right decision for you.