AWS is not a dumb pipe
AWS isn&#x27;t a single &quot;thing&quot;, or perhaps, it&#x27;s only a bundled brand. There are many teams, sub-companies, divisions, groups all working on their own parts. Most have to follow a similar set of rules and some attempts are made to make it cohesive, but in the end it&#x27;s not a single minded entity with a single set of parameters it follows for every service offering.<p>You can run your stuff on AWS without ever touching compute, storage and networking yourself, and you can also run your stuff on AWS by only touching compute, storage and networking and nothing else. You can guess your risk wrong and do everything as a root user in a single account, and you can create an account vending machine in a well-architected organisation with policies in place to prevent the huge amount of footguns lying around everywhere from going off.<p>There are so many ways you could be using it that trying to put a single label on it seems pointless to me. Just like the only constant you can count on is &#x27;change&#x27;, the only &#x27;proper&#x27; usage or terminology in terms of AWS is what you know, what you need, and what you ended up doing. This includes shooting yourself in the foot with CloudFormation because you accidentally thought CDKs are your friend and JavaScript was the best tasting language for your goal, or thinking that clicking around in the console would be a good way to get your department of developers up and running.