Back in September, we introduced Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock in preview. Starting today, Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock is generally available.
With a knowledge base, you can securely connect foundation models (FMs) in Amazon Bedrock to your company data for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Access to additional data helps the model generate more relevant, context-specific, and accurate responses without continuously retraining the FM. All information retrieved from knowledge bases comes with source attribution to improve transparency and minimize hallucinations. If you’re curious how this works, check out my previous post that includes a primer on RAG.
With today’s launch, Knowledge Bases gives you a fully managed RAG experience and the easiest way to get started with RAG in Amazon Bedrock. Knowledge Bases now manages the initial vector store setup, handles the embedding and querying, and provides source attribution and short-term memory needed for production RAG applications. If needed, you can also customize the RAG workflows to meet specific use case requirements or integrate RAG with other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications.
Fully managed RAG experience
Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock manages the end-to-end RAG workflow for you. You specify the location of your data, select an embedding model to convert the data into vector embeddings, and have Amazon Bedrock create a vector store in your account to store the vector data. When you select this option (available only in the console), Amazon Bedrock creates a vector index in Amazon OpenSearch Serverless in your account, removing the need to manage anything yourself.
Vector embeddings include the numeric representations of text data within your documents. Each embedding aims to capture the semantic or contextual meaning of the data. Amazon Bedrock takes care of creating, storing, managing, and updating your embeddings in the vector store, and it ensures your data is always in sync with your vector store.
Amazon Bedrock now also supports two new APIs for RAG that handle the embedding and querying and provide the source attribution and short-term memory needed for production RAG applications.
With the new RetrieveAndGenerate API, you can directly retrieve relevant information from your knowledge bases and have Amazon Bedrock generate a response from the results by specifying a FM in your API call. Let me show you how this works.
Use the RetrieveAndGenerate API
To give it a try, navigate to the Amazon Bedrock console, create and select a knowledge base, then select Test knowledge base. For this demo, I created a knowledge base that has access to a PDF of Generative AI on AWS. I choose Select Model to specify a FM.
Then, I ask, “What is Amazon Bedrock?”
Behind the scenes, Amazon Bedrock converts the queries into embeddings, queries the knowledge base, and then augments the FM prompt with the search results as context information and returns the FM-generated response to my question. For multi-turn conversations, Knowledge Bases manages the short-term memory of the conversation to provide more contextual results.
Here’s a quick demo of how to use the APIs with the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3).
def retrieveAndGenerate(input, kbId):
return bedrock_agent_runtime.retrieve_and_generate(
input={
'text': input
},
retrieveAndGenerateConfiguration={
'type': 'KNOWLEDGE_BASE',
'knowledgeBaseConfiguration': {
'knowledgeBaseId': kbId,
'modelArn': 'arn:aws:bedrock:us-east-1::foundation-model/anthropic.claude-instant-v1'
}
}
)
response = retrieveAndGenerate("What is Amazon Bedrock?", "AES9P3MT9T")["output"]["text"]The output of the RetrieveAndGenerate API includes the generated response, the source attribution, and the retrieved text chunks. In my demo, the API response looks like this (with some of the output redacted for brevity):
