Amazon Kendra Getting Started
AWS Skill Builder
Last updated March 9, 2025
Amazon Kendra Getting Started is a free, 90-minute introduction to Amazon Kendra, AWS's machine-learning-powered search service. Where a keyword search matches the words you type, Kendra is built for natural-language questions and for searching across unstructured data, using machine learning to return more accurate results. The course covers the service essentials — how it works, its benefits, typical use cases, technical concepts, and cost — and walks through a reference architecture for a search solution you can adapt to your own needs. It then becomes hands-on: in a guided tutorial you build a working search setup in your own AWS account, creating an index, connecting a data source to feed it, and adding an FAQ so the service can answer common questions directly, before cleaning up the resources afterward.
What you'll learn
- What Kendra is and how ML-powered NL search works
- Benefits, use cases, technical concepts
- Solution architecture + cost
- Creating a search index
- Adding a data source
- Creating an FAQ, then cleaning up
Frequently asked questions about Amazon Kendra Getting Started
Who is Amazon Kendra Getting Started for?
Beginners who want a hands-on introduction to building natural-language search over unstructured data, using Amazon Kendra.
Is Amazon Kendra Getting Started free?
Yes — Amazon Kendra Getting Started is completely free to take.
What are the prerequisites for Amazon Kendra Getting Started?
AWS Technical Essentials recommended; an AWS account is needed to build the search index in the demonstration.
Why we suggest this course
A compact, end-to-end first look at intelligent search: not just what an ML-powered search service does, but a guided build of a working one — creating the index, wiring up a data source, and adding an FAQ — which is the part that shows how the pieces fit together. One thing to know: this is an introduction to a single AWS service, so it is vendor-specific by design rather than a general tour of search technology — what you build is specific to Amazon Kendra.