Build RAG-Based GenAI Applications with S3 Access Grants

Amazon S3 Access Grants is a feature of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that provides fine-grained, identity-based access control to data stored in Amazon S3. It simplifies the process of granting access to users, groups, or applications by using grant-based permissions that define who can access specific resources and under what conditions. Instead of managing complex IAM or bucket policies, S3 Access Grants automatically issues temporary access tokens that enforce the permissions dynamically, ensuring secure and auditable data access.

In this Cloud Lab, you’ll build a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application that enables users to query organizational data securely stored in Amazon S3. The solution utilizes S3 Access Grants to provide identity-based access control, ensuring that users can only retrieve data for which they are authorized to view.

You’ll begin by creating multiple IAM users who will interact with the system through specific data access permissions. You will then create an Amazon S3 bucket to store organizational data and configure Amazon S3 Access Grants to securely manage data access for each user. This ensures that users can only access the datasets to which they are authorized, simplifying access control management.

Next, you’ll create a knowledge base using the Amazon embedding model, which transforms input data into vector representations. You will then store these embeddings in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database, ensuring structured and efficient storage for easy retrieval. Once your data pipeline is established, you’ll integrate a frontend web application that interacts with Amazon Bedrock’s Nova Pro model to process user queries. When a user submits a question, the application verifies access permissions through Amazon S3 Access Grants, retrieves the relevant embeddings from Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and generates contextualized responses using Bedrock’s generative AI capabilities.

By the end of this Cloud Lab, you’ll have built a complete AI-powered, secure knowledge retrieval system that combines S3 Access Grants and Bedrock Knowledge Bases, demonstrating how to implement precise data access and retrieval in a multi-user environment.

The following is the high-level architecture diagram of the infrastructure you’ll create in this Cloud Lab: