3.6 AI/ML and Analytics Services
Key Takeaways
- Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models at scale.
- Amazon Bedrock provides access to foundation models (Claude, Llama, Mistral) for building generative AI applications without managing infrastructure.
- Amazon Rekognition uses deep learning for image and video analysis — identify objects, faces, text, and activities.
- Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that lets you analyze data in S3 using standard SQL.
- Amazon Kinesis processes real-time streaming data from sources like IoT devices, application logs, and clickstreams.
AI/ML and Analytics Services
The CLF-C02 exam includes questions on AWS AI/ML services and analytics. You need to know what each service does and when to use it — no deep technical knowledge required.
Machine Learning Platform
Amazon SageMaker
A fully managed platform for building, training, and deploying ML models at scale.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| SageMaker Studio | Integrated development environment for ML |
| Built-in Algorithms | Pre-built algorithms for common ML tasks |
| Training | Managed training infrastructure with automatic model tuning |
| Deployment | One-click model deployment to production endpoints |
| Ground Truth | Data labeling service with human + ML labeling |
When to use: Organizations building custom ML models that need full control over the training and deployment pipeline.
Amazon Bedrock
A fully managed service for building generative AI applications using foundation models from leading AI providers.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Foundation Models | Access to Claude (Anthropic), Llama (Meta), Mistral, Cohere, Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan |
| Customization | Fine-tune models with your own data |
| Agents | Build AI agents that can take actions and interact with your systems |
| Guardrails | Safety filters and responsible AI controls |
| Knowledge Bases | RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) with your data sources |
When to use: Building generative AI applications (chatbots, content generation, summarization) using pre-trained foundation models.
Amazon Q
AWS's AI assistant for business and development:
- Amazon Q Business — AI assistant that answers questions about your company data
- Amazon Q Developer — AI coding assistant (code generation, debugging, optimization)
AI Services (Pre-Trained, No ML Expertise Needed)
These services use pre-trained models — no ML expertise required:
| Service | What It Does | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Rekognition | Image and video analysis | Face detection, object recognition, content moderation |
| Amazon Transcribe | Speech to text | Meeting transcription, subtitles, call center analytics |
| Amazon Polly | Text to speech | Read content aloud, accessibility, IVR systems |
| Amazon Translate | Language translation | Real-time translation, website localization |
| Amazon Comprehend | Natural language processing (NLP) | Sentiment analysis, entity extraction, topic modeling |
| Amazon Lex | Conversational interfaces (chatbots) | Virtual agents, chatbots (powers Alexa) |
| Amazon Textract | Extract text from documents | Invoice processing, form digitization |
| Amazon Kendra | Intelligent enterprise search | Search across documents, FAQs, knowledge bases |
| Amazon Personalize | Real-time personalization | Product recommendations, personalized content |
| Amazon Forecast | Time-series forecasting | Demand forecasting, financial planning |
On the Exam: Know the one-line description for each AI service. Common pattern: "A company wants to [add subtitles / detect faces / translate text / build a chatbot]" — match to the right service.
Analytics Services
Amazon Athena
A serverless interactive query service that analyzes data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
- No infrastructure to manage — just point at your S3 data and query
- Pay per query — charged based on amount of data scanned
- Supports CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC formats
- Use case: Ad-hoc queries, log analysis, quick data exploration
Amazon Kinesis
Real-time data streaming platform with four services:
| Service | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Kinesis Data Streams | Collect and process real-time streaming data |
| Kinesis Data Firehose | Load streaming data into S3, Redshift, etc. |
| Kinesis Data Analytics | Analyze streaming data with SQL or Apache Flink |
| Kinesis Video Streams | Process and analyze video streams |
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
A managed cluster platform for running big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Presto at scale.
Amazon QuickSight
A serverless business intelligence (BI) service that creates interactive dashboards and visualizations.
AWS Glue
A serverless data integration service for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). Discovers, prepares, and combines data for analytics.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Glue Data Catalog | Central metadata repository for all data assets |
| Glue Crawlers | Automatically discover data and populate the catalog |
| Glue ETL Jobs | Transform data between formats and destinations |
AWS Lake Formation
Simplifies the creation and management of a data lake on S3 with fine-grained security controls.
Analytics Quick Reference
| Need | Service |
|---|---|
| Query data in S3 with SQL | Athena |
| Real-time streaming data | Kinesis |
| Big data processing (Hadoop/Spark) | EMR |
| Business intelligence dashboards | QuickSight |
| ETL / data preparation | Glue |
| Data warehouse queries | Redshift |
| Create a data lake | Lake Formation |
Which AWS service provides access to foundation models from multiple AI providers for building generative AI applications?
A company wants to automatically add subtitles to their video content. Which AWS service should they use?
Which AWS service lets you run SQL queries directly against data stored in Amazon S3 without loading it into a database first?
A company needs to process and analyze data from thousands of IoT sensors in real time. Which AWS service is best suited?
Which AWS AI service uses deep learning to analyze images and detect objects, faces, and text in photos and videos?