The AWS website has all the informations you need. The <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/</a> section provides 5 diagrams :<p>==> Web Application Hosting : <a href="http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_web_01.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...</a><p>==> Content and Media Serving : <a href="http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_media_02.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...</a><p>==> Batch Processing : <a href="http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_batch_03.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...</a><p>==> Fault tolerance and High Availability : <a href="http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_ftha_04.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...</a><p>==> Large Scale Processing and Huge Data sets : <a href="http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_largescale_05.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...</a><p>These are the main usages a startup can make of AWS. Of course, depending on your core business, you will need to focus on specific parts.