Which AWS service provides continuous monitoring and assesses an inventory of AWS resources?

AWS Config is the service that provides continuous monitoring and an assessment of AWS resources. It does this by enabling you to evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources over time. AWS Config keeps a detailed inventory of all resources in your AWS account and tracks their configuration history.

With AWS Config, users can define rules that govern resource configurations, and the service continuously checks the resources to ensure compliance with these predefined rules. If a resource deviates from its expected configuration, AWS Config can alert you to these changes, allowing for better governance, compliance auditing, and security analysis across your AWS environment.

The other options serve different purposes:

• AWS CloudTrail focuses on logging and monitoring API calls made within your account for audit and governance
• The AWS Management Console is a web-based interface for accessing and managing AWS services, but it does not provide monitoring or resource assessment
• AWS CloudFormation is a service used for deploying infrastructure as code, allowing you to manage and provision AWS resources through templates but it does not offer continuous monitoring capabilities.

These distinctions clarify why AWS Config is specifically designed for continuous monitoring and inventory assessment of AWS resources.