Kendra
AWS Kendra is a super-smart search engine that is designed to help you find information effortlessly. It’s a powerful search service that uses ML to understand the context and meaning behind your queries. Instead of just matching keywords, Kendra comprehends natural language, making it feel like you’re having a conversation with your search engine. It’s great for handling complex searches across vast amounts of data in documents, FAQs, or other sources. Figure 17-2 shows the Kendra service in the AWS Management Console.
Figure 17-2 AWS Kendra
AWS Kendra includes the following features:
Semantic search: Kendra uses machine learning algorithms to understand the semantics of the content and improve the accuracy of search results by recognizing nuances of and relationships between words.
Relevance tuning: Kendra allows you to fine-tune search results to prioritize certain documents or sources based on your preferences. It enables you to ensure that the most important information is surfaced first.
Rich document support: Kendra can handle a variety of document types, including PDFs, Word documents, HTML, and more, making it versatile for different types of content.
Query suggestions: Kendra provides query suggestions to guide users and help them refine their search queries for better results.
Natural language query enhancement: Kendra assists users in constructing more effective queries by suggesting natural language improvements, making the search process more intuitive.
Data Analytics Services
AWS offers a suite of data analytics services that can help a small startup or a large enterprise make informed decisions by extracting meaningful patterns from data. AWS provides scalable and flexible solutions to analyze data efficiently. With services like AWS Athena, and AWS Glue, you can turn raw data into actionable intelligence. The AWS Cloud makes data analytics accessible, allowing you to focus on uncovering valuable insights without the hassle of managing complex infrastructure.
Athena
When I first tried the AWS Athena service, I thought it was pure magic. Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that makes it possible to analyze data residing in AWS S3 buckets using standard SQL expressions. With Athena, you don’t need complex data transformation or loading processes. You dump the data into S3, and you are ready to directly query the data in its raw, native format.
Athena uses Trino and Presto, which are open-source distributed SQL query engines that enable you to execute SQL queries across your data stored in S3. Athena supports various data formats, including Avro, Parquet, ORC, JSON, and CSV, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of data structures. In addition, Athena integrates with the AWS Glue Data Catalog (discussed next) to streamline the metadata management process and enhance query efficiency.