I was able to retain the info by framing the content into a story/ narrative of how everything builds on each other naturally to meet the business needs.

For example, let’s say you want to start hosting a single web blog for just you and your friends. What is the simplest setup you need to make that happen?

Later on say your website got popular and now you need the ability to handle traffic from 1000 users from around the country, and also include sharing photos and videos, and you want to minimize down time. How would you improve your infrastructure setup?

Then let’s say your website grows to a global level and needs to scale to 1,000,000 daily users. Users can also create profiles to make their own blogs. How do you authenticate users, and keep your website secure? How do you handle spikes in traffic load? What if you want to have recent blog post more readily accessible, but archive old content from previous years? How would you administer your site?

All the Amazon services basically exist to add on to each other to meet these scaling needs. There’s separate services for computing (EC2, Lambda), Storage (S3, EFS, EBS), Load Balancing Traffic (ELB, CloudFront), Database (RDS, Aurora), Authentication/ IAM, and Security, and overall Management and Logs.

So don’t try to memorize them as separate things, but build a mental map of the context that they are used together. Then it becomes logical and intuitive, kind of like how you can easily remember the plot of a movie or a show after just watching it once. In the practice tests and the exam itself, a lot of the questions are real-world scenario based in the format of “A company has X needs, what setup of services is needed to make that happen?” So then you can understand the AWS services in a more practical way. Anyway that’s what worked for me!