With Amazon RDS, the cloud service provider is responsible for the installation, patching, and management of the database software. Managed services like RDS reduce the operational load on the customer by handling routine database maintenance tasks. However, with instances like EC2, the customer is tasked with the complete setup and maintenance of the software stack on the server. Similarly, AWS Lambda abstracts the servers, but the customer is in charge of managing the function's code. Amazon S3 is used for storage and does not involve software management responsibilities.