Overview

Think of Amazon Forecast as a crystal ball powered by the same technology Amazon uses to predict its own inventory needs. You feed it historical data (like past sales, website visits, or equipment maintenance records), and it uses artificial intelligence to predict future numbers.

What makes Forecast special is that it's designed to handle time-based predictions automatically. For example, it understands that ice cream sales go up in summer and down in winter, or that store sales spike during holidays. It can even account for special events, weather, and other factors that might affect your predictions.

Unlike traditional forecasting that requires data scientists and complex mathematics, Forecast handles all the complicated parts for you. You just upload your historical data, and it picks the best prediction method automatically.

The service is particularly useful because it can combine multiple types of related data. For instance, if you're predicting product sales, you can include not just past sales data, but also things like upcoming holidays, weather forecasts, or planned promotional events.

Example uses

Retail Store Planning: A grocery store wants to know how many gallons of milk to order next week. They upload their past sales data to Forecast, which considers factors like upcoming holidays, local events, and weather to predict how much milk they'll need.
Website Capacity Planning: A website owner wants to predict how many servers they'll need. By feeding Forecast their past traffic data, they can predict busy periods and scale their AWS EC2 instances accordingly.
Inventory Management: A clothing store wants to predict demand for winter coats. Forecast can combine past sales data with weather predictions and holiday schedules to suggest how many coats to stock.
Energy Usage Prediction: A power company wants to predict electricity demand. They can use Forecast to analyze past usage patterns along with weather forecasts and upcoming events to predict power needs.

Integration with other AWS services

Amazon Forecast works well with several common AWS services:

Store your historical data in Amazon S3 and Forecast can read it directly
Use AWS Lambda to automatically trigger new forecasts when fresh data arrives
Save forecast results back to Amazon S3 for analysis in Amazon QuickSight
Set up alerts based on forecast results using Amazon SNS
Import data directly from your Amazon Aurora or RDS databases