Amazon Q Developer just reached a $260 million dollar milestone

To help them be more productive, developers all over the world are turning to generative AI-powered assistants like Amazon Q Developer, the most capable assistant for accelerating software development. While Amazon Q Developer is great at providing code suggestions, writing new code is one of many things developers have to do on a day-to-day basis. Amazon Q goes well beyond writing code, helping developers with tasks like testing, debugging, understanding existing code, finding security vulnerabilities, implementing entire new features, and more. One of the most time consuming and frustrating tasks is upgrading applications to the latest version. Developers and IT teams need to modernize their existing applications to take advantage of the latest technologies that help them innovate faster and improve performance – but upgrade campaigns are costly, often taking months or years to complete.

Amazon Q Developer helps alleviate toil for a range of software development tasks using agents that are like giving developers a team to help them complete tasks. Agents can reason and plan with minimal human intervention, and are capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks.

On August 1st, Andy Jassy shared an exciting finding regarding the real and quantifiable impact that the Amazon Q Developer agent for code transformation offers IT and developer teams of any size. Amazon has migrated tens of thousands of production applications from Java 8 or 11 to Java 17 with assistance from Amazon Q Developer. This represents a savings of over 4,500 years of development work for over a thousand developers (when compared to manual upgrades) and performance improvements worth $260 million dollars in annual cost savings.

To determine the true business impact of Q Developer-assisted app upgrades, we estimated the time saved by looking at the number of Java dependencies we migrated. Typically, it can take a day or more of a developer’s time to migrate just one dependency, and many applications have dozens of dependencies that need migrating. With the agent for code transformation, many of these dependencies can be migrated in minutes, resulting in a significant time savings. To estimate cost savings, we looked at the number of hosts we were able to remove from the applications due to the performance improvements achieved by upgrading to Java 17. Both of these estimates are conservative and our actual cost and time saved is likely much greater.

What is the Amazon Q Developer agent for code transformation?

The Amazon Q Developer agent for code transformation automates the complete end-to-end process of upgrading and modernizing applications, significantly reducing the time and costs associated with transformation projects, while enhancing application security and performance. Developers who want to learn about how to get started with the agent can head over to community.aws for tutorials or check out this demo:

Accelerate complex, multi-step tasks to save hours of work every day

Amazon Q Developer has an agent for software development that can autonomously perform a range of tasks–everything from implementing features, to documenting and refactoring code. Developers can simply ask 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. Customers have reported efficiency improvements of 25% faster initial development and up to a 40% increase in developer productivity.

How can you get started with Amazon Q Developer?

Individual users can get started with Q Developer in the AWS Console, CLI, or in their IDE on the perpetual Free Tier. Try the Pro Tier subscription if you need to manage a team of users and policies via enterprise access controls, to customize the code suggestions Amazon Q Developer makes to include your internal code base, or to add higher limits on advanced features.