Cloud computing giant has announced the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data.
AWS said Amazon Q not only generates highly accurate code, it also tests, debugs, and has multi-step planning and reasoning capabilities that can transform and implement new code generated from developer requests.
The new service also makes it easier for employees to get answers to questions across business data such as company policies and other information by connecting to enterprise data repositories to summarize the data logically, analyze trends, and engage in dialog about the data.
AWS is likewise introducing Amazon Q Apps, a new capability that lets employees build generative AI apps from their company’s data.
Employees simply describe the type of app they want, in natural language, and the Q Apps will quickly generate an app that accomplishes their task, thus helping them automate their daily work with ease and efficiency.
“Amazon Q is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant available today with industry-leading accuracy, advanced agents capabilities, and best-in-class security that helps developers become more productive and helps business users to accelerate decision making,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Artificial Intelligence and Data at AWS.
“Since we announced the service at re:Invent, we have been amazed at the productivity gains developers and business users have seen. Early indications signal Amazon Q could help our customers’ employees become more than 80% more productive at their jobs; and with the new features we’re planning on introducing in the future, we think this will only continue to grow,” he added
Developers said only 30% (or less) of their time is spent on coding, while the rest is spent performing tedious and repetitive tasks. This could be researching best practices from various parts of the Web or learning how things work through documentation, forums, and conversations with colleagues.
Developers also have to manage infrastructure and resources, troubleshoot and resolve errors, and understand operating costs.
When they switch projects, they have to spend time learning the existing code base to understand its programming logic.
Finally, there is all the work of testing and refactoring code, upgrading applications, debugging and optimization, and ensuring security by having to carry out vulnerability scanning and applying appropriate security fixes in a timely fashion.
Companies want to empower their developers to spend less time on this coding muck and more time on creating unique experiences for their end users, while being able to deploy faster.
Q assists developers and IT professionals (IT pros) with all of their tasks — from coding, testing, and upgrading applications, to troubleshooting, performing security scanning and fixes, and optimizing AWS resources.
Amazon Q also delivers advanced and tailored generative AI capabilities as follows:
- Most accurate coding recommendations: Amazon Q helps developers build faster and more securely by generating code suggestions and recommendations in near real time. Customers such as Toyota, Blackberry, and BT Group are already using Q to increase developer productivity and speed up innovation in their organizations. Q also has a powerful customization capability that securely leverages a customer’s internal code base to provide relevant recommendations. With this capability, Q is an expert on your code and provides recommendations that are more relevant to save even more time.
- Amazon Q Developer Agents: Q has a unique capability, called agents, which can autonomously perform a range of tasks – everything from implementing features, documenting, and refactoring code, to performing software upgrades. Developers can simply ask Amazon Q to implement an application feature (such as creating an “add to favorites” feature in a social sharing app), and the agent will analyze the existing application code and generate a step-by-step implementation plan. To save customers months, even years, upgrading applications, Q can also automate and manage the entire upgrade process – with Java conversions now available and .Net conversions coming soon to help people move from Windows to Linux. In their integrated development environment (IDE), developers simply ask Amazon Q to “transform” their project and the agent analyzes application source code, generates new code in the target language or version, executes tests, and completes all code changes.
- Best-in-class security vulnerability scanning and remediation: Q scans code for hard-to-detect vulnerabilities, such as exposed credentials and log injection. With a single click, Q automatically suggests remediations tailored to the application code, allowing developers to quickly accept fixes with confidence. Q’s security scanning capabilities outperform leading publicly benchmarkable tools on detection across most of the popular programming languages, helping to significantly improve the security and code quality of a developer’s application.
- Q is an expert on AWS and optimizing AWS environment: Amazon Q Developer is an expert on AWS and is in the console to help IT pros optimize their cloud environments, as well as diagnose and resolve errors and networking issues, select instances, optimize structured query language (SQL) queries, extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, and provide guidance on architectural best practices. To further help customers optimize their cloud environments, today Amazon Q Developer includes a new feature that helps customers list their AWS account resources, and analyze billing information and trends, making it easier for them to manage their accounts.
Finally, Amazon Q’s conversational interface is available wherever it is needed — in the AWS Console, in Slack, or in IDEs, including Visual Studio Code and JetBrains – to give developers the ability to use the conversational experience of Q within their favorite software development solutions.
To extend the Q experience to more places developers work, AWS is announcing new partner extensions from Datadog and Wiz, and an integration with GitLab Duo that will offer joint customers a unified interface — whether working in AWS or GitLab. By integrating Amazon Q’s generative AI capabilities with solutions that developers know, use, and trust, developers can update and create software faster.
