Question 1

What's the difference between Amazon Kendra and Amazon OpenSearch Service?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kendra is an enterprise search service designed to understand natural-language questions and return highly relevant documents and passages with minimal tuning. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed search and analytics engine where you typically design your own indexing strategy, relevance tuning, and query logic. Use Kendra when you want an out-of-the-box “enterprise Q&A/search” experience with connectors and ML relevance; use OpenSearch when you need full control over search schemas, custom ranking, and analytics at the engine level.

Question 2

When should I use Amazon Kendra?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon Kendra when you need employees or customers to search across many document sources (SharePoint, S3, Confluence, databases, file shares, etc.) using natural language, and you want strong relevance without building a custom ML search stack. It’s a good fit for internal knowledge bases, IT helpdesks, HR policy search, legal and compliance document discovery, and customer support agent assist—especially when permissions and source-of-truth access control matter.

Question 3

How much does Amazon Kendra cost?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kendra pricing depends on the edition/capacity you choose and the features you enable. Key cost drivers typically include: (1) index capacity/edition (how much content and query throughput you need), (2) the number of queries, and (3) optional features such as additional connectors or advanced capabilities. For accurate numbers, use the Amazon Kendra pricing page and the AWS Pricing Calculator, and estimate based on document count/size, expected query volume, and environments (dev/test/prod).

Amazon Kendra

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