Classic three-tier AWS architecture routes traffic through an Application Load Balancer to a t2.micro EC2 instance backed by RDS. The ALB distributes incoming requests to the compute layer, which then queries the managed RDS database for persistent storage. This pattern establishes a foundation for scalable, highly available web applications with clear separation of concerns. Fork this diagram on Diagrams.so to add Auto Scaling groups, multi-AZ redundancy, or swap in Fargate for serverless compute.