Amazon Q Developer FAQs

Just like with your IDE, you own the code that you write, including any code suggestions provided by Amazon Q Developer. You are responsible for the code that you write, including the Amazon Q Developer suggestions that you accept. Always review code suggestions before accepting them, and you might need to make edits to ensure that the code does exactly what you intended.

For users who access Amazon Q Developer with the Pro Tier, your content is not used for service improvement, or to train any underlying foundation models (FMs). Unless explicitly opted out, content from Amazon Q Developer Free Tier might also be used to enhance and improve the quality of FMs. Your content will not be used if you use the opt-out mechanism described in the documentation. For more information, see Sharing your data with AWS.

When using Amazon Q Developer as an Amazon CodeWhisperer Professional user, Amazon Q stores user activity data related to your response to the answers and code suggestions (such as thumbs up or down for a response). CodeWhisperer Professional uses your content, such as code snippets, comments, and content from files open in the IDE. This content is processed by the service solely to provide and maintain the service. If you access Amazon Q Developer through plans offered at no charge, namely in the IDE with a CodeWhisperer Individual tier, then Amazon might use your questions or responses for model training. You can opt out of using content from Amazon Q Developer for service improvement by following the instructions in the documentation. Content processed by CodeWhisperer Professional is not stored or used for service improvement or for model training. For information about how CodeWhisperer Professional and CodeWhisperer Individual collect and use your data, see the CodeWhisperer Professional FAQs and CodeWhisperer Individual FAQs, respectively.

Amazon Q Developer offers two plans: a no-cost Free Tier and a Pro Tier priced at $19/user per month.

For VS Code or JetBrains, install the Amazon Q IDE extension through the respective extension or plugin marketplace. For Visual Studio, install the AWS Toolkit with Amazon Q extension. Then, authenticate with AWS Builder ID or AWS IAM Identity Center. After authenticating, Amazon Q Developer can be found in the activity bar in VS Code or the tool window anchored in the top right in JetBrains. For more help getting started with Amazon Q Developer, see Getting started with Amazon Q Developer.

With the Amazon Q Developer agents for software development (/dev, /test, /doc, /review), you can go from a natural language prompt to an application feature with interactive step-by-step instructions right from your IDE with GitLab Duo with Amazon Q (preview) or Amazon CodeCatalyst. Amazon Q Developer understands your workspace structure and breaks down your prompt into logical implementation steps, which can include generating application code, tests, API integrations, and more. You can collaborate with Amazon Q Developer to review and iterate on the implementation. When ready, you can ask the Amazon Q Developer agents for software development to implement each step.

Relevant information about programming languages, frameworks, and tools being used for your tasks can greatly aid in obtaining accurate responses. Breaking down complex problems into smaller components helps in receiving more targeted assistance for the individual components. If an answer is unclear, you are encouraged to request clarifications from Amazon Q Developer. Please also consider experimenting and iterating on your questions and prompts, as programming often involves trying different approaches. With the Amazon Q Developer customization capability, you can customize Amazon Q Developer to generate more relevant inline code recommendations by making it aware of your internal libraries, APIs, best practices, and architectural patterns.

Amazon Q Developer uses the following contextual information while answering questions: 1. Current conversational context, like questions asked and answers and code generated in the conversation panel. 2. The IDE context, including the selected code line, snippet, or functions in the file, as well as the filename and the repository that the developers are currently working on.

With the Amazon Q Developer agents for software development, you can go from a natural language prompt to an application feature with interactive step-by-step instructions right from your IDE with GitLab Duo with Amazon Q (preview) or with Amazon CodeCatalyst. Amazon Q Developer understands your workspace structure and breaks down your prompt into logical implementation steps, which can include generating application code, tests, API integrations, and more. You can collaborate with Amazon Q Developer to review and iterate on the implementation. When ready, you can ask Amazon Q Developer to implement each step. The Amazon Q Developer agent for software development can now also perform code reviews, automatically providing comments on merge requests, flagging suspicious code patterns, and even assessing deployment risk. And with in-depth knowledge of your project, Amazon Q Developer agents can help generate unit tests across your code base or document your code by automatically generating readme files and data-flow diagrams.

The Amazon Q Developer agents for software development are available in VS Code, JetBrains, and Eclipse (preview) IDEs.

The Amazon Q Developer agents for software development in the IDE are available to Amazon Q Developer Pro customers and Amazon Q Developer Free Tier customers, with limits. See Getting started with Amazon Q Developer or read the documentation to learn more.

AWS provides developers with services such as AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Network Access Analyzer, and Amazon CodeGuru to help verify code and configuration security. CodeCatalyst automatically creates deployment pipelines that use these tools to help validate that code changes are tested and safe to deploy.

The Amazon Q Developer reference tracker detects whether a code suggestion might be similar to publicly available code. The reference tracker can flag such suggestions with a repository URL and project license information or optionally filter them out. You can then more easily find and review the referenced code and see how it is used in the context of another project before deciding to use it. All references are logged for you to review later to ensure that your code flow is not disturbed, and you can keep coding without interruption.

As you write code, Amazon Q Developer analyzes the English language comments and surrounding code to infer what code is needed to complete the task at hand. Amazon Q Developer suggests one or more code snippets directly in the code editor, accelerating your work. Amazon Q Developer code suggestions are based on LLMs trained on billions of lines of code, including open source and Amazon code. You can quickly and more easily accept the top suggestion (tab key), view more suggestions (arrow keys), or continue writing your own code. Always review a code suggestion before accepting it, and you might need to edit it to ensure that it does exactly what you intended.

Amazon Q Developer uses your content--such as code snippets, comments, cursor location, and contents from files open in the IDE--as inputs to provide code suggestions.

You can scan your code to identify hard-to-find security vulnerabilities and get code suggestions to help remediate the identified issues. Built-in security scanning is designed to detect issues such as exposed credentials and log injection. Generative AI–powered code suggestions help to remediate the identified vulnerabilities and are tailored to your application code, so you can quickly accept fixes with confidence. Security scanning is available for Java, Python, JavaScript, and for TypeScript, C#, AWS CloudFormation (YAML, JSON), AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) (TypeScript, Python), and HashiCorp Terraform (HCL). Code suggestions to help remediate vulnerabilities are currently available for code written in Java, Python, and JavaScript.

As generative AI, Amazon Q Developer creates new code based on what its underlying models have learned from the code that they were trained on and the context that you provided in code and comments. While Amazon Q Developer is not designed to reproduce code from training data, it is possible that on rare occasions it will generate code that closely matches publicly available code. If Amazon Q Developer detects that its output matches publicly available code, the built-in reference tracker will notify you with a reference to the license type (for example, MIT or Apache) and a URL for the publicly available code. You can then more easily find and review the referenced code and see how it is used in the context of another project before deciding whether or not to use it. To ensure that your coding flow is not disturbed, all references are logged for you to review later, so you can keep coding without interruption.

Yes. In the configuration setting for Amazon Q Developer, you can deselect the Include Suggestions With Code References option. This will prevent Amazon Q Developer from making suggestions that include references to known licensed open source code. For Amazon Q Developer Free Tier users, this setting is available in the IDE. With Amazon Q Developer Pro, the AWS administrator can centrally configure this setting on an organization level from the console.

Amazon Q Developer can filter out code suggestions that include toxic phrases and suggestions that contain commonly known code structures that indicate bias.

Amazon Q Developer is designed to prevent suggesting code with security vulnerabilities, and as many security vulnerabilities are filtered out as possible. However, given the generative nature of Amazon Q Developer we cannot completely rule out code suggestions with security issues. Therefore, Amazon Q Developer comes with a built-in code-scanning feature that detects security vulnerabilities within your Python, Java, and JavaScript projects, including code suggestions from Amazon Q Developer and code written by you.

Amazon Q Developer was trained on various data sources, including Amazon and open source code. Amazon Q Developer has been trained and validated to generate code suggestions from English language comments. Given the various examples in the training dataset, it is possible that Amazon Q Developer might provide code suggestions from comments written in non-English languages; however, this is not a supported use case.

Amazon Q Developer for command line helps developers be more productive in the command line with contextual CLI completions, inline documentation, and AI natural language–to-bash translation. Amazon Q Developer for command line integrates with a developer’s existing command line so developers don’t have to change the tools they use to start benefiting.

While a user types in their command line, Amazon Q Developer shows inline completions and documentation for over 250 CLI tools.

For example, a developer can type “git” and see a list of all the git subcommands, options, and arguments, ordered by their usage recency. A developer could also type “npm install” and see a list of all the node packages available to install. Additionally, a developer could type “aws” and see a list of all the AWS subcommands available.

Amazon Q Developer for CLI can take natural language text prompts (such as "reverse my most recent git commit") and convert them into instantly executable bash code.

To get started, run Amazon Q, insert a prompt, and then execute the bash.

Amazon Q Developer for command line currently supports integrations with the following tools:
1. Operating systems: macOS
2. Shells: bash, zsh, fish
3. Terminal emulators: iTerm2, macOS terminal, Hyper, Tabby
4. IDEs: Terminal inside VS Code
5) CLIs: 250+ of the most popular CLIs such as git, aws, docker, npm, yarn (see Github)

For support with Jetbrains IDEs (except Fleet), Alacritty, Kitty, and Wezterm on macOS, run cw integrations install input method.

Yes.
1. Run "cw" to open the settings page.
2. Select the CLI Completions tab.
3. Toggle the switch in the top right corner of the page to Off.

Yes. You can customize Amazon Q Developer to generate even more relevant inline code recommendations and chat responses by making it aware of your internal libraries, APIs, best practices, and architectural patterns.

Currently, you can customize Amazon Q Developer recommendations on code bases written in Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python. Files written in other languages supported by Amazon Q Developer (C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, shell scripting, SQL, and Scala) will not be used when creating the customization or when providing customized recommendations in the IDE based on your internal code repositories.

You can create up to eight customizations based on your internal code bases. You can keep up to two code customizations active at the same time.

You can securely connect your code repositories to Amazon Q Developer using the console. Amazon Q Developer administrators can manage access to a private customization from the console, so only specific developers have access.

GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is available in preview. Visit GitLab on AWS to sign up for preview access.

GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is free for GitLab Ultimate self-managed customers during preview.

Amazon Q Developer can help you diagnose common errors in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service consoles. When an error appears in one of the supported consoles, you can choose the Diagnose with Amazon Q Developer button next to the error to get context on what might have caused the error, as well as step-by-step instructions on implementing potential fixes.

To analyze the error, Amazon Q Developer queries information—such as Account ID, AWS Resource identifiers, or the error message—in the scope of approved policy and user permissions.

If you need more specific help or guidance, you can contact AWS Support. Amazon Q Developer integrates with AWS Support, so you can seamlessly connect with support agents from within the Amazon Q Developer interface if additional assistance is required. This option helps remove obstacles in your self-service experience. This integration with AWS Support is available to all AWS customers accessing Amazon Q Developer through the console, and it will honor the entitlements of the customer's support plan.

Amazon Q Developer has been trained on 17 years' worth of AWS expertise. Therefore, it can help you get started with AWS services, learn about best practices when architecting and building your applications, find the right service for the job, list and describe AWS resources running in your account (in preview), and much more. For example, you can ask Amazon Q Developer, "How can I build a web application on AWS?" right in the AWS Management Console, and Amazon Q Developer will walk you through the steps and provide references where you can learn more.

Amazon Q Developer does not have complete visibility into the resources in your account, but it can list and describe certain resources you’re using (in preview), such as Amazon S3 buckets or Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon Q Developer will direct you to the best billing resources available but currently cannot provide billing information about your account or organization bills and costs. However, Amazon Q Developer can now help you retrieve and analyze cost data from AWS Cost Explorer (preview).

No. Developers can only start the process by telling Amazon Q Developer in the console that they want to make changes to their application. After the initial interaction, Amazon Q Developer directs developers to their preferred IDE or their project in CodeCatalyst where they can continue the same conversation.

Visit the CloudWatch page here for steps to get started with Amazon Q operational investigations and explore how to leverage the capability.

Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for migrating on-premises VMware workloads to Amazon EC2 provide three advantages. First, it orchestrates your entire migration journey, boosting team productivity. Second, it automates complex and labor-intensive migration tasks including wave planning and network conversion, accelerating migrations, reducing errors, and minimizing the need for in-house expertise—fast-tracking your time to value. Finally, Amazon Q Developer customizes your migration journey by understanding your specific migration goals and analyzing your on-premises environment.

Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities leverage generative AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms to provide you with a more intelligent, adaptive, and automated migration experience. Unlike traditional tools that often require extensive manual input and decision-making, Amazon Q Developer transformation can autonomously analyze your environment, suggest optimal migration strategies, and adapt plans in real-time based on changing conditions. Amazon Q Developer transformation AI capabilities continually learn from each migration, improving its recommendations and automation processes. This results in faster, more accurate migration planning and execution, reducing the reliance on scarce migration expertise and minimizing the risk of human error.

Amazon Q Developer supports porting .NET Framework applications to cross-platform Linux-ready .NET (preview), modernizing COBOL applications on mainframes to Java applications on AWS (preview), moving virtualized workloads on VMware to scalable workloads on Amazon EC2 (preview), and upgrading Java from version 8 to versions 11 and from version 11 to 17.

To get started with Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for .NET, mainframe, or VMware transformation, you can log in to the “Amazon Q Developer: Transform” web experience with your current enterprise credentials. If you are a new customer, you can use single sign-on (SSO) with AWS IAM Identity Center integration and connect it to an AWS account to get started.

For .NET porting, you can connect to your source code repository in GitHub. Amazon Q Developer scans your linked repository, finds suitable projects, and lets you customize selections. Choose projects to modernize with admin approval. Once approved, the agent automatically ports your .NET applications to the selected version, from Windows to Linux. You can monitor the transformation's progress through the dashboard and worklogs. Amazon Q Developer commits the transformed code to a new branch in your repository once the task is complete, preserving the original source code.

For mainframe application modernization, you can provide Amazon Q Developer with some of your existing mainframe application code, which it will use to assess the code base. Using its underlying LLM, Amazon Q Developer creates comprehensive documentation to understand and expand the knowledge base of your organization. Amazon Q Developer agents decompose large monoliths into simple and loosely coupled business domains, making the systems more agile and easier to maintain. Next, you define your high-level modernization objectives using natural language. Amazon Q Developer builds a comprehensive action plan to refactor your mainframe codebase to Java and deploy it on AWS services like Amazon EC2, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Fargate. Amazon Q Developer agents work autonomously, notifying you of ongoing or completed actions, and blockers requiring your attention.

For VMware migrations, Amazon Q Developer transform will guide you to add connectors to your on-premises VMware environment or upload your asset inventory from third-party tools. You can start a new project in Amazon Q Developer transform by specifying your goals.

Currently, Amazon Q Developer transformation only supports migrating on-premises VMware environments to Amazon EC2. While Q Developer transform does not support automated migration of on-premises VMware environments to Amazon Elastic VMware Service, it understands your migration goals and provides guidance on migrating to Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) by using VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) for your use case.

Amazon Q Developer support for Java upgrades is available through the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains and VS Code IDEs. Support for .NET application porting from Windows to Linux is available through Visual Studio IDEs.

Amazon Q Developer transformation helps you discover on-premises servers using the AWS Application Discovery Service. Amazon Q Developer transformation plans your migration to AWS using the configuration data that Application Discovery Service collects about your on-premises servers and databases, using ML techniques such as Graph Neural Networks to plan your migration waves. It offers two ways of performing discovery and collecting data about your on-premises servers:

Agentless discovery can be performed by deploying the Application Discovery Service Agentless Collector (Agentless Collector) (OVA file) through your VMware vCenter. The Agentless Collector can VM configuration and utilization, database meta and utilization, and network connections.

Agent-based discovery can be performed by deploying the AWS Application Discovery Agent on each of your VMs and physical servers. The agent installer is available for Windows and Linux operating systems. It collects configuration data, utilization data, inbound and outbound network connections, and processes that are running.

To get started with Application Discovery Service, you must designate an AWS account as your discovery account and then connect it to the VMware modernization capabilities of Amazon Q Developer. You can then configure Application Discovery Service, download a collector, and view collected data on Amazon Q Developer’s discovery summary page.

The Amazon Q Developer agent for code transformation supports upgrades of Java version 8 and version 11 applications to version 17.

Yes, Amazon Q Developer transformation is designed to migrate your complex, multitier applications. Its graph neural network technology identifies intricate application dependencies and relationships, even in large, complex environments. It then groups related servers into logical application groups that need to be migrated as a single migration wave. For instance, when migrating a 500 VM environment, Amazon Q Developer transform may identify that 50 VMs need to be migrated as a single unit due to tight coupling. This capability is particularly valuable for customers with interconnected legacy systems or microservices architectures. You can also download the application groupings generated by Amazon Q Developer transform, review and edit them if needed, and upload the updated groupings back to Amazon Q Developer transform to continue their migration.

Amazon Q Developer offers transformation capabilities for large-scale porting of .NET Framework applications to cross-platform .NET, modernization and migration of COBOL applications on mainframe to Java applications on AWS, and migration and modernization of VMware workloads to Amazon EC2. These capabilities are available in a unified web experience tailored for large-scale modernization and team collaboration. The .NET transformation capabilities can also be accessed by developers in the Visual Studio IDE environment. The Java upgrade capabilities of Amazon Q Developer that have been available in the VS Code and JetBrains environments will be available in the web experience soon.

To initiate the migration of your VMware network configuration in Amazon Q Developer transform, the following information needs to be provided:

• vSwitch-based networks managed by vSphere virtual network: An exported configuration file from RVTools, including vSwitches, port groups, and VLANs.
• For software-defined networks (SDNs) like VMware NSX: An export of all SDN resources in JSON format. For VMware NSX, the export can be performed using the Import/Export for NSX tool.
• The exported configuration and resource data provide the necessary information about the existing virtual network setup, which is needed in order to plan and execute the network migration process. This ensures the new target network can be properly configured to match the current environment.

Amazon Q Developer is the first generative AI–powered assistant for transforming .NET workloads. It eases the burden of migrating Windows-based .NET Framework applications to cross-platform .NET compatible with Linux. Amazon Q Developer agents engage with customers in a natural language chat to identify source repositories, connect to those repositories, and choose the projects to port. Thereafter, the agents port applications from Windows Server to Linux to reduce licensing costs and upgrade unsupported versions of .NET Framework, .NET Core, .NET 5 to supported versions of cross-platform .NET to improve performance, security posture, and compliance.

Yes, Amazon Q Developer transform uses a human-in-the-loop mechanism to allow authorized users to review, approve, and edit artifacts that it generates. For example, once Amazon Q Developer transform generates a migration wave plan, authorized users will receive a “Collaboration” request to review and approve the wave plan, including the mapping of servers to waves and sequencing of waves. To update the wave plan, Amazon Q Developer transform provides users an option to export the data in csv format, edit it, and import the updated data set for Amazon Q Developer transform to continue the migration job.

Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities currently support modernizing C#.NET applications for the following project types: console application, class library, web API, WCF service, and business logic layers of model-view-controller (MVC) and single-page application (SPA). The projects should have Microsoft authored NuGet package dependencies only. For Windows .NET applications dependent on Internet Information Server (IIS), only default IIS configurations are supported for porting to cross- platform .NET. Amazon Q Developer helps you identify supported project types in your applications using its bulk assessment capability. Amazon Q Developer supports transforming applications written using .NET Framework versions 3.5+, .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5, .NET6, and .NET 7 to any of Microsoft’s currently supported cross-platform .NET versions such as .NET 6, and .NET 8.

Currently, Amazon Q Developer transformation supports migration to a single AWS target account and a single Region for migrations of VMware workloads to Amazon EC2. However, you can create multiple transformation jobs within the same workspace to target different accounts for your application portfolio.

Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities currently support the modernization of IBM z/OS mainframe applications written in COBOL, Job Control Language (JCL) and relying on Customer Information Control System (CICS) transaction manager, basic mapping support (BMS) screens, Db2 databases, and Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) data files. Other mainframe languages will be supported at a later stage based on customer demand and feedback.

Amazon Q Developer transformation provides a complete migration experience supported by many new and existing capabilities. Along with providing new capabilities for application
grouping and network migration, Amazon Q Developer transform uses existing AWS migration tools, such as Application Discovery Service and AWS Application Migration Service, to complete VMware migrations to Amazon EC2. Amazon Q Developer transform orchestrates the migration process, triggering actions in existing tools and augmenting them to offer a more efficient migration experience.

Amazon Q Developer is the first generative AI–powered assistant for large-scale migration and modernization of VMware workloads. Amazon Q Developer agents simplify and accelerate migrations of workloads running on VMware to Amazon EC2. Amazon Q Developer allows migration practitioners to specify their goals, generate a plan to achieve those goals, run approved actions on their behalf, and track the progress and status of the migration. Amazon Q agents use on-premises server inventory and network data provided by the users to understand users’ server inventory, identify application dependencies, and propose application groups for migration waves. The agents convert on-premises network configurations to AWS network constructs such as VPCs, subnets, security groups, and internet gateways. Amazon Q Developer then deploys the translated network in a designated AWS account and migrates the VMs to Amazon EC2 instances in that account. It provides users a collaborative experience, allowing multiple stakeholders to collaborate on migrations, while providing them with a comprehensive view of the latest status of the job through rich dashboards.

To get started log in to the Amazon Q Developer transform web application with your current enterprise credentials. If you are a new customer, you can use single sign-on (SSO) with IAM Identity Center integration and connect it to an AWS account to get started. For VMware migrations, Amazon Q Developer transform will guide you to add connectors to your on-premises VMware environment or upload your asset inventory from third-party tools. You can start a new project in Amazon Q Developer by specifying your goals.

Amazon Q Developer transformation for Java, .NET, mainframe, and VMware is available to all users with an Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription. Customers can access Java transformation in their IDE with the Amazon Q Developer Free Tier.

Currently, Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities support migration from VMware NSX and VMware vSphere virtual network environments, including Virtual Distributed Switches, port groups, and VLANs.