Here’s a practical rundown of the AWS services people reach for most often, grouped by what they do:

Compute

• EC2 — virtual servers, the backbone of most AWS workloads (what your WordPress stack runs on)
• Lambda — serverless functions, run code without managing servers, pay per invocation
• ECS / EKS — container orchestration (ECS is AWS-native, EKS is managed Kubernetes)
• Auto Scaling — automatically adjusts EC2 capacity (already in your template)

Storage

• S3 — object storage; the default place to put files, backups, static assets, logs
• EBS — block storage attached to EC2 instances
• EFS — shared network file system across multiple instances (used in your template)

Database

• RDS — managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. — what you’re using)
• DynamoDB — managed NoSQL, extremely popular for serverless apps
• Aurora — AWS’s own MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible database, faster and more scalable than stock RDS

Networking

• VPC — your private network in AWS (every account uses this)
• Route 53 — DNS and domain management
• CloudFront — CDN for caching content close to users
• Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB) — distributes traffic across instances (used in your template)

Identity & Security

• IAM — permissions and access control; touches literally everything (you just added an IAM role for cfn-signal)
• Secrets Manager — securely store credentials/API keys (a good upgrade from the plaintext DB password in your template)
• KMS — encryption key management

Deployment & Infrastructure-as-Code

• CloudFormation — what you’re using right now
• CodePipeline / CodeBuild / CodeDeploy — CI/CD
• Systems Manager (SSM) — patching, running commands remotely, parameter store (you’re already using SSM to resolve the latest AMI)

Monitoring

• CloudWatch — logs, metrics, alarms — the first place to look when something breaks
• CloudTrail — audit log of every API call made in your account

Messaging/Integration

• SQS — message queues for decoupling services
• SNS — pub/sub notifications
• EventBridge — event-driven architecture glue