The document discusses five key principles for architecting applications on AWS: elasticity, designing for failure, loose coupling, security, and performance. It provides examples and services for each principle such as using Amazon EC2 for elasticity, designing with fault tolerance using services like RDS and Route 53, loosely coupling components with services like SQS and SWF, leveraging security services like IAM, and scaling vertically with cluster compute or horizontally using services like ElastiCache for performance.