AWS Cloud Map
Service discovery software
DevOps software
Containerization software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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What is AWS Cloud Map
AWS Cloud Map is a managed service discovery service that lets teams register application resources and discover them using DNS and API-based queries. It is used by DevOps and platform teams to locate microservices and other endpoints across AWS compute environments such as containers, VMs, and serverless workloads. Cloud Map integrates with AWS service orchestration and networking services and supports health checking to help route discovery results to healthy instances. It is typically adopted in AWS-centric architectures where teams want managed discovery without operating their own registry infrastructure.
Managed service registry
Cloud Map provides a managed registry for services and instances, reducing the need to operate and scale a self-hosted discovery system. It supports creating namespaces and services and registering instances with attributes that can be queried. This can simplify operations for teams that otherwise maintain their own discovery control plane. It also aligns with AWS operational tooling and IAM-based access control.
DNS and API discovery
Cloud Map supports DNS-based discovery as well as API-based discovery queries, which helps fit different application patterns. DNS discovery works well for legacy and simple client integrations, while API discovery supports richer filtering and metadata use cases. This dual approach can reduce the need for custom adapters in heterogeneous environments. It also enables consistent naming across services via namespaces.
AWS ecosystem integrations
Cloud Map integrates with AWS services commonly used for microservices and containers, enabling service registration and discovery within AWS-native workflows. This can reduce integration effort compared with stitching together separate discovery components. Health checking support can be used to avoid returning unhealthy endpoints in discovery results. For teams standardizing on AWS, this can streamline platform implementation.
AWS-centric portability limits
Cloud Map is designed for AWS environments and uses AWS APIs, IAM, and service integrations. Organizations running significant workloads outside AWS may need additional tooling or parallel discovery systems. This can increase architectural complexity in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments. Migrating away from AWS can also require reworking discovery and naming patterns.
Not a full mesh control plane
Cloud Map focuses on service registration and discovery rather than providing a broader service networking feature set. Capabilities such as advanced traffic management, policy enforcement, or cross-datacenter federation typically require additional components. Teams may still need separate solutions for API gateway, ingress, or service mesh functions. This can lead to multiple layers of networking configuration.
Operational model tied to AWS limits
Service quotas, regional design choices, and AWS-specific configuration patterns can influence how Cloud Map is deployed and scaled. Teams must manage namespaces, service definitions, and instance registration behavior in line with AWS constraints. Troubleshooting often requires AWS-specific observability and knowledge of related services. This can raise the learning curve for teams new to AWS networking and discovery.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go Free tier/trial: No permanently free tier or time-limited free trial stated on the AWS Cloud Map pricing page.
Pricing details:
- Service registry charge — $0.10 per registered resource per month (Service registry charges = # of registered resources per month × $0.10).
- Lookup (discovery) requests charge — $1.00 per 1,000,000 HTTP API calls (Discovery API calls charged at $1.00 per million HTTP API calls).
Optional/related charges (via Amazon Route 53, referenced on the AWS Cloud Map pricing page):
- DNS namespace (hosted zone) — $0.50 per hosted zone per month (first 25 hosted zones).
- DNS queries — $0.40 per 1,000,000 queries (first 1 billion queries/month).
- Optional Route 53 health checks (pricing referenced to Route 53 pricing page).
Examples (as shown on the official page):
- Example 1 (HTTP discovery): Service registry charges = # registered resources × $0.10; discovery API calls = $1.00 per million HTTP API calls (example calculation included on AWS page).
- Example 2 (DNS discovery): Service registry charges = # registered resources × $0.10; DNS namespace = $0.50 per hosted zone/month; DNS queries = $0.40 per million queries (example calculation included on AWS page).
Notes & caveats:
- AWS Cloud Map has no upfront payments; you pay only for what you use.
- For detailed Route 53-related charges (DNS and health checks) AWS Cloud Map pricing refers to the Amazon Route 53 pricing page.
- All pricing items and examples above were taken from the AWS Cloud Map official pricing page.
Seller details
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Seattle, Washington, USA
2006
Subsidiary
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://x.com/awscloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazon-web-services/
