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 18 services below are the ones the AWS Cloud Practitioner path expects you to know. Open the study path →
✨ Generative AI · 1
🧠 ML Platform (SageMaker) · 1
🤖 AI Services · 7
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 →
🗄️ Data & Analytics · 1
🛡️ Security & Governance · 5
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 →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 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 →
⚙️ Compute & Cost · 3
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 →
Preparing for the exam? Start the AI Practitioner study guide or jump into the AIF-C01 learning path.