AWS Services for .NET developers
Choose the optimal services for your .NET applications and services
David Pallmann
Amazon Employee
Published May 7, 2025
A broad selection of AWS cloud services are available to .NET developers. How can you decide which cloud services to use with confidence? Use AWS Decision Guides for a detailed overview of AWS services and structured guidance about criteria to consider. I've also found it helpful to narrow down your service choices by answering a few key questions, which I'll share in this post. At a high level, consider the following:
- Do you prefer self-managed DIY services, or managed services? Managed services manage infrastructure for you and automate tasks such as software patching, backups, and scaling.
- Do you want to run serverless? Many managed AWS services are inherently serverless or offer serverless options (see Serverless on AWS).
Let's look at key questions to ask by service category. I'll also mention some of the popular services for .NET applications in each section, but be sure to review the service category links to find the best service for your use case.
Use AWS compute services to host your .NET applications and services. Consider these questions:
- Start by identifying which unit of compute you want to work with: virtual machines (VMs), containers, or serverless functions.
- Second, which OS do you want to run on, Windows or Linux? You can run both Windows and Linux on AWS, but Linux gives you a broader range of service options.
Once you have those questions answered, investigate these compute service options:
- Run VMs (Windows and Linux) on Amazon EC2 (self-managed). For web applications, you can use AWS Elastic Beanstalk for a managed experience that includes automatic load balancing, scaling, and patching.
- Run containers (Windows and Linux) on Amazon EKS (Kubernetes) or Amazon ECS.
- Run serverless functions (Linux only) on AWS Lambda. Reduce cold-start latency with Lambda SnapStart for .NET.
For AWS cloud databases, consider the following:
- Do you need a relational database or a NoSQL database?
- Do you need a licensed database product or will an open source database meet your needs?
Once you have those questions answered, investigate these database service options:
- SQL Server is a popular database for .NET applications. Refer to AWS for SQL Server for a range of options including hosting on VMs, managed SQL Server, and open source alternatives.
- For managed relational databases, use Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS offers popular licensed database products such as SQL Server and Oracle, as well as open source databases like Aurora PostgreSQL and MySQL.
- For managed NoSQL databases at Internet scale, Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless NoSQL database that can scale worldwide with single-digit millisecond performance. Consider a purpose-built database for specific needs, such as graph databases.
AWS storage services give you reliable, scalable, secure storage for your data.
- Do you need object storage, file storage, or block storage?
- For general object storage,use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). S3 has 11 9's of durability and options for
- For file storage, use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for Linux and Amazon FSx for Windows.
- For block storage, use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).
Use AWS Messaging services to interconnect your applications and services.
- Do you need messaging queuing, publish-subscribe notifications, or an event bus? Use the services below for flexible, managed messaging.
- Do you need durable messaging?
Evaluate the messaging services below for suitability. For a comparison, refer to Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, or Amazon EventBridge?
- For simple message queuing, use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as well as file storage, block storage,
- For simple publish-subscribe messaging and push notifications, use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).
- For event-driven applications at scale where you need a serverless event bus, use Amazon EventBridge.
You can simplify your .NET messaging code with the AWS Message Processing Framework for .NET, which reduces the amount of boilerplate messaging code you need to write.
Security is a top consideration for AWS and its customers. Secure your cloud workloads with AWS security services.
- Securely manage identities and access with AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM).
- Add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control for web and mobile applications with Amazon Cognito.
- To authenticate against Active Directory while running in containers, host them on Amazon ECS using group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA). For Windows containers, see gMSA instructions in the Amazon ECS developer guide. For Linux containers, use AWS Credentials Fetcher.
AWS machine learning services streamline the ML lifecycle and include purpose-built for a variety of common tasks. In some cases, you can put them to work right away with the need to train models.
- What are your use cases for machine learning?
- Are you looking to build, train, and deploy machine learning models, or use an existing purpose-built ML service that is already trained?
Use AWS SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Also consider these pre-trained purpose-built machine learning services that are ready to use:
- Perform text-to-speech with Amazon Polly.
- Transcribe speech-to-text with Amazon Transcribe.
- Extract text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents with Amazon Textract.
- Automate image and video analysis with Amazon Rekognition.
- Build conversational interfaces for Chatbots with Amazon Lex.
- Ue natural-language processing to find insights and relationships in text with Amazon Comprehend.
- Use language translation to localize content with Amazon Translate.
AWS generative AI services let you harness large laguage models (LLMs) and foundation models (FMs) to build generative AI applications.
- Are you looking for a generative AI-powered assistant, or to buid your own generative AI solutions?
Consider these generative AI services:
- For an AI-powered assistant, use Amazon Q. Amazon Q is available in multiple products.
- Amazon Q Business makes generative AI securely accessible to everyone in your organization.
- Amazon Q Developer helps developers build, operate, and transform software.
- Amazon QuickSight provides a generative AI Business Intelligence assistant.
- Easily build your own generative AI applications, with a choice of foundation models, using Amazon Bedrock.
This tour of AWS services and key considerations should help you choose the right services for your needs. As you evaluate a cloud service, be sure to visit its product detail page to confirm it meets your use case, review the pricing model, and understand its SLA. To help with evaluation, take advantage of the AWS Free Tier offered by many AWS services.
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.