This article is wildly inaccurate. My corrections:
- DynamoDb allows for a lot of filtering, and Lambda + DDB Streams can do aggregations that are written as state changes and provide incredible read speeds. Use it if its a good fit, and its only a good fit if you're ready to learn its query language and quirks. When it is a good fit, its a world-class database.

- SQS pricing is $0.0000004 per request [1] with 1 Million monthly messages free.

- SQS + SNS is far more flexible and reliable than Kinesis, plus you're paying for and managing shards by the hour. Its great for streaming analytics data processing and distribution (within the Kinesis suite there is stream processing ala Spark and streaming ingest to Elastic, S3, and Redshift). If you're not doing data engineering on a streaming set of events that can't fit in a spreadsheet, its just not the right fit.

- Lambda is not expensive to use with DynamoDB at all, the pipes are so fast that that 50-100ms is typical for a call and response. Lambda does get gnarly with SQL databases that require connection management and pooling, but they have improved that situation on multiple fronts in the past 6-9 months.

- Also, Lambda ought to be considered the first choice for runtimes for greenfield apps, not just for AWS plumbing. This is strictly opinion and definitely depends on your team and existing codebase, but it makes sense from a cost and scaling standpoint for all kinds of projects.

- NLB should be the first choice only for specialized use cases like UDP services or those that require extraordinary throughput. ALB gives you an incredible feature set with things like HTTPS, Auth, access logging, routing requests to different machines or Lambdas based on url path, canary deployments, and more. Use as much or little as you like. The cost difference between ALB and NLB is negligible for most use cases.

If you're new to AWS and cloud stuff: welcome, the water's fine. Sure its hard at first to grok all the breadth and depth of the offerings, but you get to build with the same tools the largest services on the web depend on. Start small and pick a service, learn it from the console, then cli. Hit up the docs a lot and ask questions, there are lots of people that can help. Do NOT get lead astray by this article or opinion pieces on Medium.

Something like 75% of AWS services are geared at serving enterprises with on-premise data centers that want to move some or all of their workloads to the cloud. Stick with the basics like S3, Lambda, SNS, SQS, and whatever servers you need. Pick a managed service vs servers when you can unless you have solid sysadmin resources and a good reason. Avoid hourly billed services whenever you can until you can get cost management figured out. VPC is daunting unless you're good with networking, but you can avoid it entirely by using the primitives mentioned above. IAM takes some real grokking, but there is almost nothing you can't do with it to scope permissions both internally and externally.

AWS YouTube Channel is full of quality material for all levels. Try to start forming your opinions with those and your own experience instead of unsubstantial articles or random HN comments :)