Bedrock Knowledge Bases

Managed RAG: ingest, embed and retrieve documents.

Problem it solves: Grounds an LLM in current, private knowledge.

Where it sits: Called by the orchestrator before the LLM.

When to use

  • RAG.

When not to use

  • Knowledge already inside the prompt.

Failure modes

  • Slow vector search stalls the whole answer.
  • Wrong ACL filtering.

Metrics to watch

  • Retrieval latency
  • Hit rate of relevant docs

Alternatives

  • Long-context prompting

Configuration in Labs (illustrative defaults)

  • Instances (count) = 2 — Identical copies behind this logical component. Capacity scales linearly in this model.
  • Capacity per instance (req/s) = 500 — Maximum requests one instance completes per second before it saturates.
  • Base service time (ms) = 10 — Processing time per request at zero load. Queueing adds to this as utilisation rises.

Vendor examples (pattern only): AWS managed service. Simulated as a generic “Retrieval service”.

In the guide