What is Amazon Q Developer?

Amazon Q Developer, part of the Amazon Q portfolio, focuses on software development tasks, such as code generation, analysis and optimization. It also provides recommendations about AWS infrastructure, such as documentation, optimizations, best practices and troubleshooting for cloud resource configurations. Through a conversational interface, users can type prompts and define instructions on the tasks or analyses to execute.

There are many ways for developers to interact with Amazon Q Developer, including the following:

• AWS console.
• Mobile app.
• Documentation pages.
• Chat applications.
• Integrated development environments (IDEs).
• CLIs.

It can be accessed for application software development tasks from the UIs of AWS tools that handle code or SQL statements, such as Amazon EMR Studio, Amazon SageMaker AI Studio, JupyterLab, AWS Lambda, AWS Glue Studio, AWS Cloud9,Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift. It also integrates with external Git repositories, like GitLab.

For development and operational tasks, integrating it with your preferred IDE and using it through the AWS console or CLI are highly recommended.

AWS Console-to-Code feature

For some services, such as EC2, VPC and Relational Database Service, the console supports the AWS Console-to-Code feature. This enables Amazon Q Developer to record manual interactions in the console and convert them to code syntax for the AWS CLI, Cloud Development Kit and CloudFormation. Though this feature is limited to the mentioned services, it is expected to expand to other AWS resources.

How IDE integration with Amazon Q Developer works

With Amazon Q Developer's focus on software development tasks, its integration with IDE tools is particularly relevant. It supports commonly used IDEs, such as Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Eclipse, Visual Studio, JetBrains and the AWS coding environments mentioned above. For supported IDEs, download an Amazon Q plugin or extension for the specific IDE, which is available on their respective marketplace websites.

Here is an example of how IDEs work with Amazon Q Developer. In this case, I used VS Code. After downloading and installing the extension for VS Code, the IDE requires users to log in to AWS.

Keep in mind: The user must have sufficient Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions. These can be provided by attaching the AmazonQDeveloperAccess managed policy to the IAM entity using the console. This gives the developer full access without administrator access. Then, invoke Amazon Q from the AWS console by clicking on the icon located at the top-right corner, which enables a chat interface.

For the free tier of Amazon Q Developer, users must have an AWS Builder ID. For those using the monthly Pro subscription, they need access to an identity managed by AWS IAM Identity Center.

Users should familiarize themselves with the tab for Amazon Q Developer.

Developers can also select one or more lines of code and right-click. The extension displays several options. Each delivers a way to understand and optimize existing code. Consider the following examples:

• Explain. Details the functionality delivered by a block of code, which can help clarify complex lines of code.
• Refactor. Suggests recommendations that can deliver a better code structure or align with best practices.
• Fix. If there are syntax errors in a piece of code, returns code snippets with the issue fixed.
• Optimize. Provides recommendations for better performance or compute resource utilization and explains the reasoning.
• Generate tests. Generates unit test files.
• Send to prompt. Has the ability to start prompts with /dev, /test, /review, /doc or /transform, depending on the task to be performed.
• Inline chat.Supports a chat interface that delivers these features using natural language capabilities.

Security

AWS emphasizes that the data made accessible to Amazon Q is not used to train its underlying models. This means sensitive data is securely kept inside organizations' AWS accounts and is not shared outside. This provides a secure environment for analysis, development, troubleshooting and operational tasks.

Amazon Q is built on Amazon Bedrock, which has an automated abuse detection feature. This feature detects functionality that violates theAWS Responsible AI Policy, ensuring that this tool cannot be used to create or optimize code intended for harmful or illegal purposes.

Amazon Q Developer pricing

There is a free tier and a Pro subscription package, which charges a $19 monthly fee per subscribed user. ForAWS Organizations, each Pro user can have access to all AWS member accounts with a single monthly fee.

A few features are unavailable in the free tier, but it provides similar functionality to the Pro subscription. Depending on the feature, users could see a limited number of interactions per month. These include the following:

• Generate or refine code.
• Integrate data.
• Generate or analyze SQL statements.
• Diagnose errors in the console.

In general, the free tier is a good way to learn about the features available in Amazon Q Developer.

Ernesto Marquez is owner and project director at Concurrency Labs, where he helps startups launch and grow their applications on AWS. He enjoys building serverless architectures, building data analytics solutions, implementing automation and helping customers cut their AWS costs.