AWS has introduced a customized "Enterprise Generative AI Assistant" service for businesses. This new generative AI assistant natively supports Amazon’s security and privacy protection, designed specifically for office needs. It enables users to quickly obtain answers to complex questions, generate content, and take action based on their own information repositories, code, and corporate systems. Employees can leverage company data and expertise to ask questions, solve problems, generate content, and take action. Potential customers and partners, such as Accenture, BMW Group, Gilead, Mission Cloud, Orbit Irrigation, and Wunderkind, are already looking forward to using Amazon Q.

AWS announced the launch of the Amazon Q Preview, a new generative AI-powered assistant designed for work and customizable according to customer needs.

Amazon Q brings a set of features to support developers and IT professionals. You can now use Amazon Q to build applications on AWS, research best practices, fix bugs, and get help writing new features for your applications. For example, Amazon Q Code Transformation can now perform Java application upgrades from versions 8 and 11 to version 17.

Amazon Q is available in multiple AWS regions, allowing users to get answers and insights quickly no matter where they work. Below is a quick overview of Amazon Q, including integration within integrated development environments (IDEs):

Building Applications with Amazon Q

Application development is a journey. It involves continuous cycles of research, development, deployment, optimization, and maintenance. At every stage, many questions arise, from selecting the right AWS services to resolving issues in application code.

Amazon Q, with 17 years of AWS knowledge and best practice training, is designed to provide a new experience at every stage of building applications on AWS. Through Amazon Q, we can minimize the time and effort needed to answer AWS questions, explore new AWS features, learn unfamiliar technologies, and build innovative solutions.

Check out the features of Amazon Q!

1. Conversational Q&A

Imagine if you could interact with Amazon Q like chatting, asking questions, learning new things, and discovering best practices for building apps on AWS without leaving the AWS console. This is what Amazon Q's conversational Q&A offers—convenient and practical!

To start using this feature, select the Amazon Q icon on the right side of the AWS Management Console.

Just like chatting with a friend, you can ask Amazon Q, "What serverless service in AWS is used to build a serverless API?" It will give you clear and concise answers with reference material so you can explore further or verify the information. If you have more questions or want to explore further, Amazon Q will continue the conversation and provide more detailed answers.

Sometimes we are confused by situations with very specific requirements. We can explain our needs and provide context to Amazon Q in detail.

For example, you can ask Amazon Q, "I plan to build a serverless API with 100,000 requests per day, each request needs to query a database.What is the best service for this workload?"Amazon Q will respond with a list of AWS services you can use, trying to limit the answer to results that can be accurately cited and validated through best practices.

Here are some additional details we may need to note:

Amazon Q's conversational Q&A feature is currently available in preview in all commercial AWS regions.
This feature integrates with AWS Chatbot into the AWS Management Console, AWS Console mobile app, AWS Documentation, AWS Website, and Slack and Teams, making it easier and more convenient to find the content you need.

2. Optimized Amazon EC2 Instance Selection

With so many options available, selecting the correct Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type for your workload can be challenging. Amazon Q aims to make this easier by providing personalized recommendations.

To use this feature, you can ask Amazon Q, "Which instance type should I use to deploy a web application server to host an app?" This feature is also available when launching instances in the Amazon EC2 Console! When selecting instance types, you can choose to get recommendations, which will display a dialog to define your requirements.

Our requests are automatically transformed into Amazon Q prompts in the chat panel. Imagine you're selecting EC2 instances for a specific project but are unsure which one is the best fit. Amazon Q comes in handy! It provides a list of suggestions to help you choose the most suitable instance type and configuration, ensuring your workload runs smoothly and cost-effectively.

Preview is available in all commercial AWS regions, providing EC2 instance type recommendations based on use cases.

3. Troubleshooting and Fixing Errors Directly in the Console

Amazon Q can also help us resolve various AWS service errors directly in the console. With the solutions proposed by Amazon Q, slow manual log checks or research can be avoided.

For example, suppose an AWS Lambda function tries to interact with Amazon DynamoDB, but for unknown reasons, it doesn't work. Now, with Amazon Q, we can troubleshoot this issue faster by selecting to use Amazon Q for troubleshooting.

Amazon Q provides concise error analysis to help us understand the root cause of the issue and suggested solutions.With this information, you can follow the steps described by Amazon Q to resolve the issue.

In just a few minutes, you can get a solution to your problem, saving you time and without disrupting your development workflow. The Amazon Q feature is in preview for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon ECS, and AWS Lambda in the US West (Oregon) region.

4. Network Troubleshooting Assistance

Amazon Q can assist in troubleshooting network connection issues caused by misconfigurations in your current AWS account's network. For this feature, Amazon Q works with the Amazon VPC Reachability Analyzer to check connections and network configurations to identify potential issues.

This makes diagnosing and solving AWS network issues easy, such as: "Why can't I connect to my EC2 instance via SSH?" or "Why can't I access my web server from the Internet?" You can ask Amazon Q.

Then, in the response text, you can choose the preview experience here, which will provide instructions to help us resolve issues related to network connectivity.

Here are a few things we need to know:

This feature is currently in preview in the US East (Northern Virginia) region.

To learn more about the feature and sample questions, refer to the Amazon Q Network Troubleshooting Getting Started section in the AWS documentation.

5. Integration and Conversational Functionality in the IDE

As mentioned earlier, Amazon Q is also available in supported IDEs. This allows you to interact with Amazon Q via chat or by typing the action command "/ " in the chat box to call an action, ask questions, and get help directly within the IDE.

First, you need to install or update the latest AWS Toolkit and sign in to Amazon CodeWhisperer. After signing in to Amazon CodeWhisperer, it will automatically enable the Amazon Q chat feature in the IDE. Once Amazon Q is enabled, you can start chatting to get coding assistance.

You can ask Amazon Q to describe a source code file.

From here, you can improve your application, for example, by integrating it with Amazon DynamoDB. You can ask Amazon Q, "Generate code to save data to a DynamoDB table named save_data(), accept data as parameters, and return a boolean status if the operation runs successfully."

After reviewing the generated code, you can manually copy and paste it into your editor. You can also choose to "Insert at cursor" to directly place the generated code into the source code.

This feature allows us to focus on building applications because we can get answers and context-specific coding guidance without leaving the IDE. You can try this preview feature in Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs.

6. Interactive Guidance for Feature Development

Another exciting feature Amazon Q offers is interactive guidance from concept to feature development within the IDE and Amazon CodeCatalyst.

With interactive step-by-step instructions and best practices, you can go from natural language prompts to application features directly from the IDE in minutes. Through prompts, Amazon Q will try to understand the application structure and break down the prompt into logical, atomic implementation steps. To use this feature, you can first call the action command /dev in Amazon Q and describe the task you need Amazon Q to handle.

You can then review, collaborate, and guide Amazon Q in the chat for the specific area to be implemented.

If you use Amazon CodeCatalyst, you can use additional features to help you, such as releasing features faster through a complete pull request. In Amazon CodeCatalyst, you can assign new or existing issues to Amazon Q, which will handle the end-to-end development workflow. Amazon Q will review the existing code, propose a solution, seek feedback on the approach, generate mergeable code, and submit a pull request for review. All you need to do afterward is review Amazon Q’s proposed solution.

The screenshot below shows the pull request created by Amazon Q in Amazon CodeCatalyst.

Here are a few things we should know:

The Amazon Q feature development capability is currently available in preview in Visual Studio Code and Amazon CodeCatalyst.
To use this feature in the IDE, you need to have the Amazon CodeWhisperer Professional layer. Please visit the Amazon CodeWhisperer pricing page for more information.
To learn more about this feature, read the blog post: Improve Developer Productivity with Generative AI-Powered Amazon Q in Amazon CodeCatalyst (Preview)

7. Use Amazon Q Code Transformation to Upgrade Applications

Amazon Q can now upgrade entire applications in hours by launching guided code transformations. This feature, called Amazon Q Code Transformation, simplifies the maintenance, migration, and upgrading of existing applications.

First, navigate to the CodeWhisperer section and select Transform. Amazon Q Code Transformation automatically analyzes the existing codebase, generates a transformation plan, and completes key transformation tasks from the proposed plan.

Some additional information about this feature:

Amazon Q Code Transformation is now available in preview for AWS Toolkit for IntelliJ IDEA and AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

To use this feature, you need to have the Amazon CodeWhisperer Professional layer during the preview period.

During the preview, Java 8 and 11 applications can be upgraded to version 17, the Java Long-Term Support (LTS) version.

To learn more about this feature, read the blog post: Upgrade Your Java Applications with Amazon Q Code Transformation (Preview)

Get Started with Amazon Q Today:

With Amazon Q, you will have an AI expert by your side to answer questions, code faster, solve problems, optimize workloads, and even help you write new features. These features simplify every stage of building applications on AWS.

If you need additional help, Amazon Q allows you to contact an AWS Support agent directly from the Q interface, eliminating any dead ends in the customer self-service experience. Integration with AWS Support can be done in the console and will respect the entitlements of your AWS Support plan.

Learn More:

Learn More About Amazon Q:

(This article is an excerpt translated from Amazon Q brings generative AI-powered assistance to IT pros and developers (preview) , 28 Nov 2023)

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AWS Launches Amazon Q: A Generative AI Assistant Tailored for Enterprises