DEVOPSdigest

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data.

Amazon Q not only generates highly accurate code, it also tests, debugs, and has multi-step planning and reasoning capabilities that can transform (e.g., perform java version upgrades) and implement new code generated from developer requests. Amazon Q also makes it easier for employees to get answers to questions across business data such as company policies, product information, business results, code base, employees, and many other topics by connecting to enterprise data repositories to summarize the data logically, analyze trends, and engage in dialog about the data. Today, AWS is also introducing Amazon Q Apps, a new and powerful 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 Q Apps will quickly generate an app that accomplishes their desired task, helping them streamline and automate their daily work with ease and efficiency. To learn more about Amazon Q, visit aws.amazon.com/q.

“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, VP 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.”

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 delivers advanced and tailored generative AI capabilities, including:

- 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 Blackberry, BT Group, and Toyota are already using Q to increase developer productivity and speed up innovation in their organizations. Amazon Q Developer has the highest reported code acceptance rates in the industry, for assistants that perform multi-line code suggestions, with BT Group recently sharing that they accepted 37% of Q’s code suggestions and National Australia Bank reporting 50% acceptance rates. Q also has a powerful customization capability that securely leverages a customer’s internal code base to provide more relevant and useful code recommendations. With this capability, Q is an expert on your code and provides recommendations that are more relevant to save even more time. Q keeps customizations completely private, and the underlying foundation model (FM) does not use them for training, protecting customers’ valuable intellectual property.

- 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 asking it to create an “add to favorites” feature in a social sharing app), and the agent will analyze their existing application code and generate a step-by-step implementation plan. Developers can collaborate with the agent to review and iterate on the plan before the agent implements it, connecting multiple steps together and applying updates across source files, code blocks, and test suites. Carrying out these tasks, Q has achieved the highest scores of any software development assistant available today, scoring 13.4% on the SWE-Bench Leaderboard and 20.5% on the SWE-Bench Leaderboard (Lite), a dataset that benchmarks coding capabilities.

To save customers months, even years, of time upgrading applications, Q can also automate and manage the entire upgrade process–with Java conversions available today 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. A five-person team at Amazon used Q to upgrade more than 1,000 production applications from Java 8 to Java 17 in just two days (the average time per application was less than 10 minutes), saving months of time, and improving application performance–previously, many of these applications would each take a couple of days to upgrade.

- 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 your 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, configurations, and analyze billing information and trends, making it easier for them to manage their accounts. For example, IT pros can simply ask, “What instances are currently running in US East 1?” or “What’s my S3 bucket encryption?” or “What were my EC2 costs by region last month?” and Amazon Q Developer will list the resources and details in a summarized answer with links to learn more.

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.