Accelerate Amazon Q implementation: SMB’s starter kit

When you start your cloud journey, you may wonder how you’ll start, whether you’re a small business (SMB) or a managed service provider. Questions such as “Are I following best practices?”, “Are you optimizing cloud costs?”, “How difficult is the learning curve?” etc. are very common. AWS is here to provide a concept called a starter kit.

The starter kit is a fully deployable solution that addresses common, reproducible business issues. They deploy services that make up the solution according to best practices, optimize costs and become familiar with this type of architectural pattern without much investment in training. Above all, the starter kit saves time. This can be spent with your business and customers.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to the Amazon Q Business starter kit. If you have a repository of documents that need to quickly turn into a knowledge base, or if you just want to test the functionality of your Amazon Q business without any major investments in the console, this solution is for you.

This deployment guide covers the steps to set up an Amazon Q solution that connects to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Web Crawler data sources, and integrates with AWS Iam Identity Center for Authentication. I’ll do it. The AWS CloudFormation template automates the deployment of this solution.

Amazon Q Business is a generic AI-powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summary, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information from your enterprise system. It allows employees to be more creative, data-driven, efficient, ready and productive.

Solution overview

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

The workflow includes the following steps:

1. Before accessing an Amazon Q web application, users authenticate using their AWS ID and Access Management (IAM) ID username and password.
2. Once authentication is successful, users can access the Amazon Q Web UI and ask questions.
3. Amazon Q retrieves related information from indexes that are entered using data from connected data sources (Amazon S3 and Web Crawler).
4. Amazon Q then uses the Internal Large Language Model (LLM) to generate responses and present them to users via the Amazon Q Web UI.
5. Users can provide feedback about their responses via the Amazon Q Web UI.

Prerequisites

Before deploying the solution, make sure you do the following:

• AWS Account – You need an active AWS account with the necessary permissions to deploy the CloudFormation stack and create the required resources.
• Amazon S3 Bucket – Make sure you have an existing S3 bucket that will be used as an Amazon Q data source. To create an S3 bucket, create the first S3 bucket.
• AWS IAM ID Center – Configure the AWS IAM Identity Center in your AWS environment. During the deployment process, you must provide the required details, such as the IAM Identity Center instance Amazon resource name (ARN).

Deploy the solution using AWS CloudFormation

To deploy a cloud formization template, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console.
2. Please choose one of the following: Start the stack Open the AWS CloudFormation console and use the desired AWS Region to create a new stack. Note that this stack defaults to us-east-1.
   
3. for Stack nameenter the name of the application (for example, AMAZON-Q-STARTER-KIT).
   
4. in parameter section, iamidentitycenterarnenter the ARN of your IAM Identity Center instance.
5. for QBusinessApplicationNameEnter the name of the Amazon Q Business application.
6. for s3datasourcebucketenter the name of the S3 bucket you created previously.
7. for webcrawlerdatasourceurlenter the URL for the Web Crawler data source.
8. choose Next.

9. In Configure stack options Leave all as default and select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation may create IAM resources And then choose Next.

10. In Review and Creation Page, select submit.
    
11. The Amazon Q Business Console displays the new applications you created.
12. Select a new Amazon Q business application and Data Source Select section, data source s3_datasource Select Sync now.
13. Select a data source webpage-datasource Select Sync now.
    
14. To add groups and users to your Amazon Q application, see the instructions.

Test the solution

To validate your Amazon Q solution, it works as expected. Run the following tests:

1. Intake of test data:
   1. Upload the test file to an S3 bucket.
   2. Ensure that the file is being ingested and processed successfully by Amazon Q.
   3. Check the Amazon Q Web Experience UI for processed data.
2. Test the Web Crawler feature:
3. Make sure Web Crawler can retrieve and ingest data from the website.
4. Make sure your data is displayed correctly in the Amazon Q Web Experience UI.

cleaning

To clean up, delete the CloudFormation stack and S3 bucket you created.

Conclusion

The Amazon Q Starter Kit provides a streamlined solution for SMB to use the power of AI and intelligent questions. By automating deployment and integration with key data sources, this kit reduces the complexity of your Amazon Q setup, quickly unlock insights to your business and increase productivity.

If SMB has a repository of documents that need to be converted into a valuable knowledge base, or if you want to consider the features of Amazon Q, we recommend using this starter kit. Start today and experience the transformative benefits of enterprise-grade question answers tailored to your business needs and let us know what you think in the comments. To investigate more generative AI use cases, see AI Use Case Explorer.

About the author

Nneoma okoroafor Partner Solutions Architect focuses on AI/ML and Generated AI. Nneoma is passionate about providing guidance to AWS partners on using the latest technologies and techniques to provide innovative solutions to their customers.

Joshua Ama I am a partner solution architect at Amazon Web Services. He mainly serves consulting partners, providing architectural guidance and recommendations for new and existing workloads. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with soccer, golf and family and friends.

Jason Brown We are a Partner Solutions Architect focused on helping AWS Distribution Partners and their Seller Partners build and grow AWS practices. Jason is passionate about building solutions for MSP and VARs in small business spaces. Outside the office, Jason is an avid traveler and enjoys offshore fishing.