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Amazon Kendra - Runbook & Reference

中文 · GitHub source Facts verified against official AWS documentation: 2026-08-19

Overview

Amazon Kendra is a managed intelligent search service that uses natural language processing and semantic ranking to retrieve answers from your documents, going beyond keyword search. Note: Amazon Kendra is no longer open to new customers; for similar capabilities, AWS recommends Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases.

Key concepts

  • Index: the searchable store of documents; Kendra offers GenAI Enterprise, Basic Enterprise, and Basic Developer edition indices.
  • Data sources: connectors to repositories such as SharePoint, S3, and databases for crawling and syncing documents.
  • Semantic search: understands the context of questions and returns the most relevant answers, snippets, or documents.
  • Query types: factoid questions (single-word/phrase answers from FAQs/documents), descriptive questions, and keyword/natural-language questions.
  • Intelligent ranking: re-rank results from another search service using Kendra semantic capabilities.
  • GenAI integration: Kendra GenAI indices can back Amazon Q Business and Amazon Bedrock knowledge bases for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
  • Security: results reflect your organization's access model with user/group filtering; you are responsible for authentication and authorization.

Common operations (AWS CLI)

# Create an index and a data source
aws kendra create-index --name corp-search --edition ENTERPRISE_EDITOR \
  --role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/kendra-role
aws kendra create-data-source --index-id <index-id> --name s3-docs \
  --type S3 --configuration file://ds-config.json
aws kendra start-data-source-sync-job --id <data-source-id> --index-id <index-id>

# Query the index
aws kendra query --index-id <index-id> --query-text "How do I reset my password?"
aws kendra list-indices

Best practices

  • Choose the GenAI Enterprise index for production RAG and enterprise search workloads.
  • Curate metadata and FAQs to improve answer quality; use access control lists for document security.
  • Sync data sources on a schedule and monitor sync job status.
  • Use intelligent ranking to improve an existing search engine without migrating.
  • For new generative search use cases, evaluate Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases as the current recommended service.
  • Budget for provisioned indices: you are charged for provisioned indices even when idle.

Troubleshooting

Symptom Checks and fixes
No results Check index status, data source sync, and query/access filter configuration.
Sync job failed Review the data source configuration, credentials, and document format support.
Answers inaccurate Improve metadata, FAQs, and document quality; re-index after changes.
Search returns restricted docs Verify ACL/user-group filtering is configured in the index.
Cannot create index Kendra is closed to new customers; use Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases.

Limits

Indices per account, document and metadata limits, and data source sync quotas apply. See the Amazon Kendra endpoints and quotas page and Service Quotas console for current values.

Official references