What is the purpose of the AWS pipeline object and the IAM role when moving data from Amazon RDS to a machine learning service?

In an AWS ML pipeline, the pipeline object defines the data flow: it specifies the source (Amazon RDS), the destination (the ML service), and any transformations or staging steps. The IAM role is a set of permissions that the pipeline assumes to access resources. It grants the pipeline secure, least‑privilege access to read from RDS, write to S3 or other storage, and invoke the ML service. Together, the pipeline object orchestrates the movement of data, while the IAM role ensures that only authorized actions are performed during that movement.