AWS Services, Explained in Five Questions
Every service card answers the questions that actually matter when you meet a new AWS service: What is it, why does it exist, when should you pick it, where does it sit in an architecture, and how do you integrate it — plus exam-angle tips and links to the official AWS documentation and blogs. Coverage is tuned to the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam.
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The 44 services below are the ones the AWS AI Practitioner path expects you to know. Open the study path →
✨ Generative AI · 5
Amazon BedrockFully managed access to foundation models through one API.A serverless service that exposes foundation models from Amazon (Nova, Titan), Anthropic (Claude), Meta (Llama), Mistral, and others through a sing…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon Bedrock GuardrailsConfigurable safety filters for prompts and model responses.A policy layer for Bedrock applications that filters harmful content, blocks denied topics, redacts PII, filters profanity, and can detect hallucin…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon Q BusinessAn enterprise AI assistant grounded in your company data.A ready-made generative assistant that answers employee questions, summarises documents, and completes tasks using your organisation's own content …What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon Q DeveloperA generative AI assistant for building on and operating AWS.An AI coding and cloud assistant that autocompletes code, explains and upgrades codebases, scans for security issues, and answers AWS questions ins…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker JumpStartA model hub for deploying and fine-tuning pretrained models in your account.A catalogue of hundreds of open-weight and proprietary foundation and task models (Llama, Mistral, Falcon, Stable Diffusion, plus classic vision/NL…What · Why · When · Where · How →
🧠 ML Platform (SageMaker) · 7
Amazon SageMaker AIThe end-to-end platform for building, training, and deploying ML models.AWS's managed machine-learning platform covering the whole lifecycle: notebooks (Studio), data prep, distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, m…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker ClarifyBias detection and model explainability across the ML lifecycle.A SageMaker capability that measures statistical bias in datasets (pre-training) and models (post-training), explains individual predictions using …What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker Data WranglerVisual, low-code data preparation for machine learning.A visual interface in SageMaker Studio for importing, exploring, transforming, and featurising data with 300+ built-in transformations — turning wh…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker Ground TruthHuman labeling workforces and workflows for training data.A data-labeling service that routes images, text, and video to human annotators — your own team, third-party vendors, or the Mechanical Turk crowd …What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker CanvasNo-code machine learning for business analysts.A point-and-click application where non-programmers build, evaluate, and use ML models — tabular prediction, forecasting, and even fine-tuning foun…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker Model MonitorContinuous monitoring of deployed models for drift and quality.A monitoring capability that captures endpoint traffic and periodically checks it against a training-time baseline for data-quality drift, model-qu…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon SageMaker Feature StoreA central, consistent repository for ML features.A purpose-built store for ML features with an online store (low-latency reads at inference) and an offline store (historical data in S3 for trainin…What · Why · When · Where · How →
🤖 AI Services · 12
Amazon ComprehendNatural-language processing: entities, sentiment, PII, topics.A prebuilt NLP service that extracts insight from text — entities, key phrases, sentiment, language, syntax, topics — and detects or redacts PII, w…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon RekognitionImage and video analysis: objects, faces, text, moderation.A computer-vision service that detects objects and scenes, reads text in images, finds and compares faces, spots celebrities and unsafe content, an…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon TextractOCR++ — extract text, forms, and tables from documents.A document-analysis service that goes beyond plain OCR: it preserves structure, returning key-value pairs from forms, rows and cells from tables, a…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon TranscribeSpeech-to-text for audio files and live streams.An automatic speech recognition (ASR) service converting audio to text in batch or real time, with speaker diarisation, custom vocabularies, automa…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon PollyText-to-speech with lifelike neural and generative voices.A text-to-speech service that renders text into natural audio across dozens of languages and voices — standard, neural, and generative engines — wi…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon TranslateNeural machine translation across 75+ languages.A neural machine-translation service for real-time and batch translation, with custom terminology to lock brand/domain terms, formality control in …What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon LexConversational bots with the tech behind Alexa.A service for building voice and text chatbots using intents (what the user wants), utterances (how they say it), and slots (the parameters to coll…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon KendraML-powered intelligent enterprise search.An enterprise search service that understands natural-language questions and returns specific answers (not just links) from content spread across S…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon PersonalizeReal-time recommendations with the tech behind Amazon.com.A managed recommender service that trains private models on your users, items, and interaction events to serve personalised recommendations, rankin…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon Fraud DetectorManaged fraud-risk scoring built on Amazon's experience.A managed service that trains fraud-detection models on your historical event data (plus fraud patterns learned at Amazon) and returns real-time ri…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon Augmented AI (A2I)Human review loops for low-confidence ML predictions.A service for inserting human review into ML workflows: define confidence conditions, and predictions that fail them route to human reviewers (your…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon Connect (+ Contact Lens)Cloud contact centre with built-in conversational AI.A cloud contact centre where AI is native: Lex-powered IVR bots, real-time transcription and sentiment via Contact Lens, agent-assist suggestions f…What · Why · When · Where · How →
🗄️ Data & Analytics · 7
Amazon S3Object storage — the data backbone of every AI workload.Durable (11 nines), effectively unlimited object storage organised in buckets, with storage classes from frequent-access to deep archive, versionin…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS GlueServerless ETL and the Data Catalog for your lake.A serverless data-integration service: crawlers discover schemas into a central Data Catalog, Spark/Python jobs transform data at scale, and DataBr…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon AthenaServerless SQL directly over data in S3.An interactive query service that runs standard SQL against files in S3 (CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC) using the Glue Data Catalog for schemas — no clus…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon OpenSearch ServiceSearch, log analytics, and vector database for RAG.A managed OpenSearch cluster (and serverless option) for full-text search and log analytics that now doubles as a vector database: k-NN indexes sto…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon QuickSightServerless BI with natural-language insights (Amazon Q).A serverless business-intelligence service for dashboards and reports, with Amazon Q in QuickSight adding generative BI: ask questions in plain Eng…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon NeptuneManaged graph database — relationships as first-class data.A managed graph database supporting property graphs (Gremlin/openCypher) and RDF (SPARQL), with Neptune Analytics adding vector search over graph d…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon DocumentDBMongoDB-compatible document database with vector search.A managed, MongoDB-compatible JSON document database with separated compute/storage scaling — and native vector search, so embeddings can live besi…What · Why · When · Where · How →
🛡️ Security & Governance · 8
AWS IAMWho can do what — identities, roles, and policies.The global identity and access service: users, groups, roles, and JSON policies that allow or deny every API action across AWS, with roles providin…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS KMSManaged encryption keys for data at rest everywhere.A managed key service that creates and controls cryptographic keys, integrates with 100+ AWS services for at-rest encryption, and logs every key us…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon MacieML-powered discovery of sensitive data in S3.A data-security service that continuously inventories S3 and uses machine learning plus pattern matching to find sensitive data — PII, credentials,…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS CloudTrailThe audit log of every API call in your account.A governance service recording who called which API, when, from where — management events by default, optional data events (e.g. S3 object reads, B…What · Why · When · Where · How →Amazon CloudWatchMetrics, logs, and alarms for everything you run.The observability backbone: metrics from every service, log aggregation, alarms, dashboards, and anomaly detection — including model-invocation met…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS ConfigContinuous resource-configuration compliance.A service that records the configuration of your resources over time and evaluates them against rules — flagging, for example, an unencrypted SageM…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS ArtifactSelf-service portal for AWS compliance reports.A portal for downloading AWS's own audit artifacts — SOC reports, ISO certificates, PCI attestations — and accepting agreements such as the Busines…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS AI Service CardsAWS's transparency docs for responsible AI use.Published documents in which AWS explains, per AI service/model, the intended use cases, limitations, responsible-AI design choices, and deployment…What · Why · When · Where · How →
⚙️ Compute & Cost · 5
Amazon EC2 Accelerated InstancesGPU and AI-accelerator instances for training and inference.EC2 instance families with hardware accelerators: P-series (NVIDIA GPUs for training), G-series (graphics/inference GPUs), and Trn/Inf series built…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS Trainium & InferentiaAWS-designed silicon for cheaper training and inference.Purpose-built machine-learning chips: Trainium (Trn instances) accelerates model TRAINING; Inferentia (Inf instances) accelerates INFERENCE — both …What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS LambdaServerless functions — the glue of AI pipelines.Event-driven compute that runs code without servers, billed per millisecond, triggered by S3 uploads, API Gateway requests, queues, and schedules.What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS Cost ExplorerVisualise, analyse, and forecast your AWS spend.The console tool for exploring historical cost and usage — filter and group by service, account, region, or tag; view trends; and see ML-powered fo…What · Why · When · Where · How →AWS BudgetsSpend thresholds with alerts and automated actions.A service for setting cost and usage budgets that alert (email/SNS) at thresholds — including FORECASTED breaches — and can trigger actions like ap…What · Why · When · Where · How →
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