Why use Amazon Web Services for AI?

Amazon Web Services or AWS is by far the largest, most comprehensive cloud computing platform. AWS offers a broad set of on-demand cloud-based services, including compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, and much more. For many years, developers have leveraged these services to build enterprise-grade software solutions at scale and speed that cannot be matched by any other cloud computing platform.

What's exciting is that AWS also offers a plethora of AI services that provide pre-trained AI capabilities, including image recognition, NLP, speech recognition and generation, and conversation agents. AWS also has ML services that simplify the building, training, and deployment of custom AI capabilities via ML and deep learning models. Companies and developers can leverage these AI and ML services to add intelligence to their software solutions just as easily as with AWS' other cloud computing services.

However, the true power of developing intelligent-enabled solutions on AWS is unlocked when developers combine the AWS AI and ML services with the rest of the AWS cloud computing ecosystem. By combining various AWS services, you instantly get access to an enterprise-grade cloud computing platform with a highly reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure. This enables you, the AI practitioner, to easily collect and process large datasets so that you can integrate various AI capabilities, rapidly prototype ideas, and continuously experiment and iterate solutions.

As the title of this book suggests, this is a hands-on guide. We aim to bring together the various skills that are needed to design and build end-to-end AI solutions on the AWS platform. The keyword here is skills. We not only cover the important concepts of AI, but we also help you put these concepts into practice with numerous hands-on projects. It is only through these practical hands-on experiences that you will develop an intuition for well-designed, intelligent-enabled solutions. The projects in this book can be deployed to the AWS cloud platform; you can learn from them, you can enhance them, and you can even showcase them to others.

Working within the enormous AWS ecosystem will require a steep learning curve. New users can easily be overwhelmed by the AWS offerings. In this book, we will teach you about the patterns and practices that are needed to develop intelligent-enabled solutions, along with many of the services offered by the AWS platform. You will become intimately familiar with many of the AWS services and their application programming interfaces (APIs). Not only will you build working applications, but you will also understand the choices of the services and patterns that are being used. Along the way, we will also show you tips and tricks for working on the AWS platform.

AWS is composed of a huge number of services, and it is still growing. There are countless books and online resources that dive deeper into various subsets of these services. In this book, we will be focusing on some of the AWS services that work well together to help you build intelligent-enabled applications. We will cover most of the ML services, as well as various services for compute, storage, networking, and databases. Keep in mind that it is beyond the scope of this book to cover all the aspects of these services, let alone every AWS service.