Business Applications — AWS services

Managed services for everyday business functions such as sending email, running a contact center, and team communication.

Amazon Connect

Fully managed omnichannel cloud contact center — voice, chat, email, and tasks with no telephony hardware and no per-agent licences.

An instance is the whole contact center — phone numbers, queues, routing profiles, agents, and flows all live inside it
Flows are the drag-and-drop IVR/chatbot logic; a Lambda block inside a flow is how a call gets personalized mid-conversation
Agents work from a browser softphone — a laptop and a headset is the entire agent build
Limits: default 10 concurrent calls and 5 claimed phone numbers per instance — raise via Service Quotas weeks before launch, not on launch day

Phrases and scenarios that point here.

"Contact center", "call center", "IVR", "agents", "customer service line" → Amazon Connect
Stand up customer support in days, scale to thousands of agents, pay per minute → Connect
Agents must work from home with no on-premises phone system → Connect
Also wants call recordings, transcripts, or sentiment scoring → Contact Lens, a Connect feature, not a separate service

Bulk marketing sends, push notifications, campaign SMS → Amazon Pinpoint
Transactional or bulk email from an application → Amazon SES
A website chatbot with no agents, queues, or phone numbers → Amazon Lex on its own
Voice/video embedded in your own product rather than a support line → Amazon Chime SDK
A dedicated private network link into AWS → AWS Direct Connect (unrelated service, similar name)

A 20-person insurance agency retiring a leased PBX — claim one toll-free number, build one IVR flow, and the phone system becomes a monthly line item with zero hardware
Seasonal surge staffing: a retailer triples agent headcount for a Black Friday week and drops back in December, paying nothing for the empty seats in between
Business continuity: an office site goes dark and the support line is back up the same day, because agents only need a browser and internet
Order-status self-service where the flow calls Lambda, reads back a tracking number, and only routes to a human if the caller asks for one
Quality monitoring at scale: recordings land in S3 and Contact Lens flags the calls where sentiment dropped, so supervisors review 20 calls instead of 2,000

Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-24

Managed service for sending and receiving email from applications, over SMTP or an API.

Verify the sending identity first — an email address, or a domain via DKIM CNAME records, which covers every address on it
New accounts start in the sandbox: 200 emails per 24h, 1/sec, verified recipients only — production access is requested per Region
Reputation is yours: bounce ≥5% or complaint ≥0.1% puts the account under review; 10% / 0.5% can pause sending
Limits: 50 recipients per message, 40 MB max size (v2 API/SMTP), quotas counted per recipient and scoped per Region

Phrases and scenarios that point here.

"Transactional email", "order confirmations", "password resets", "receipts" → SES
App must email real customers, not just alert operators → SES, not SNS
Automatically capture bounces and complaints → configuration set + event destination (SNS/EventBridge)
Email only arrives for a handful of test addresses → account is still in the SES sandbox

Fan-out notifications to subscribers or systems (HTTP, SMS, Lambda) → SNS
Hosting employee mailboxes → WorkMail
Campaign orchestration, journeys, segmentation → Amazon Connect outbound campaigns

Transactional mail from an application — signup verification, password resets, receipts — sent from Lambda or ECS via the SES v2 API
Ops and CI/CD mail: nightly build digests, expiring-certificate warnings, backup failure alerts, without running Postfix on an EC2 box nobody patches
Inbound processing — receipt rules drop mail into S3 and trigger Lambda, turning invoices@ or support@ into an event-driven pipeline instead of a mailbox someone has to remember to check
Bulk sends to a list you already own, with the account-level suppression list and event feed doing list hygiene automatically
Multi-tenant SaaS sending from each customer's own domain, using sending authorization so a tenant's own verified identity is what signs the mail

Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-24