The Exam Room

22 Apr 2026 · 15 min read

Exam Room · SAA-C03

The Closest Healthy Region

A multi-region application needs to route requests to the closest healthy region, failing over automatically when the preferred one drops out -- with no client-side retries and no extra health-check plumbing to maintain. Route 53 can do all of that in a single record set. Finding the correct combination means touring all seven routing policies and the attributes that separate them.

Read article 27 Apr 2026 · 15 min read

Exam Room · SAA-C03

The Archive Nobody Reads

Some data exists for compliance, not for use. Tens of terabytes of records sitting untouched until an auditor wants them. S3 has eight storage classes; only one of them is built for that pattern, and getting it wrong can cost an order of magnitude in a year you weren't paying attention to the bill.

Read article 29 Apr 2026 · 16 min read

Exam Room · AIF-C01

Buy, Borrow, Build

A product manager with no ML background has been told to add AI to a SaaS product, and has heard of Bedrock, SageMaker, Comprehend, Translate, Textract, Rekognition. AWS has three different shapes of AI offering, and the shortest path depends entirely on whether a ready-made service already does the job.

Read article 04 May 2026 · 18 min read

Exam Room · AIF-C01

From Raw Model to Production Endpoint

A product team wants a chatbot that summarises support tickets. They have the tickets, a cloud account, and no ML background. Somebody says 'use a foundation model'. Between that sentence and a working endpoint sit roughly seven distinct stages, each with its own AWS service and its own decisions. The interesting question isn't which model to use -- it's which stages this team can skip, which they absolutely cannot, and what AWS gives them at each step.

Read article 06 May 2026 · 18 min read

Exam Room · AIF-C01

Prompt, Retrieve, or Fine-Tune

A legal-ops team wants a model that answers questions about their 4,000 in-house contract templates. The first prototype, a plain Claude call with the question in the prompt, hallucinates clause numbers. Someone suggests fine-tuning; someone else suggests RAG. The interesting question isn't which is better -- they solve different problems -- it's which problem the team actually has, and what each adaptation technique costs in time, data, and recurring spend.

Read article 11 May 2026 · 20 min read

Exam Room · AIF-C01

Grounding a Chatbot in Your Own PDFs

A facilities team has 600 PDFs -- equipment manuals, safety procedures, maintenance schedules -- sitting on a SharePoint drive. Engineers want a chatbot that answers 'how do I reset the chiller on floor 4?' in seconds instead of a ten-minute PDF hunt. Bedrock Knowledge Bases is the AWS-native answer, and from a diagram it looks like two boxes. The interesting question isn't 'does it work' -- it works -- it's which of its six configuration decisions actually matter for this corpus.

Read article 13 May 2026 · 18 min read

Exam Room · AIF-C01

Forecasting Without Writing Python

A category manager has 18 months of weekly sales data for 400 SKUs and a deadline to forecast next quarter. She doesn't code. The ML team is booked until Q3. The ask is a tool that lets her build a forecast herself -- importable, reviewable, explainable -- without waiting for engineering. The interesting question isn't whether SageMaker Canvas can do it (it can) -- it's which of its modes fits the shape of the problem, and what the business user has to understand for the answer to be defensible.

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