AWS has recently announced the preview of Amazon Q Code Transformation, a service designed to simplify the process of upgrading existing Java application code through generative artificial intelligence. The new feature aims to minimize legacy code and automate common language upgrade tasks required to move off older language versions.
Currently, Code Transformation supports the upgrade to Java 17 of Java 8 and 11 applications built with Maven. According to the cloud provider, it will soon support the upgrade of Windows-based .NET Framework applications to cross-platform .NET, accelerating migrations to Linux.
An end-to-end application upgrade using the new service requires three steps: analyzing the existing code, generating a transformation plan, and completing the transformation tasks suggested by the plan. Danilo Poccia, chief evangelist (EMEA) at AWS, explains:
Amazon Q Code Transformation can identify and update package dependencies and refactor deprecated code components, switching to new language frameworks and incorporating security best practices. Once complete, you can review the transformed code, complete with build and test results, before accepting the changes.
Code Transformation determines the code version based on the IDE configuration and it uses dependencies available on the Maven central repository server, but it copies custom dependencies from the local machine along with the application code. Matthew Wilson, VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon, writes:
Amazon Q Code Transformation uses OpenRewrite to accelerate Java upgrades for customers (...) Our internal experiments with OpenRewrite have been extremely positive, but there are situations where additional iterative debugging is needed to get to a fully building application. The iterative AI-powered debugging has me excited about Amazon Q Code Transformation.
OpenRewrite is an Apache2-licensed refactoring ecosystem for Java and other source code to perform language upgrades, framework upgrades, dependency migration, security patching, and custom transformations. Poccia adds:
An internal Amazon team of five people successfully upgraded one thousand production applications from Java 8 to 17 in 2 days. It took, on average, 10 minutes to upgrade applications, and the longest one took less than an hour.
Amazon is not the only company building a service on OpenRewrite: founded by Jonathan Schneider, the inventor of the open-source software auto-refactoring tool, Moderne provides a SaaS service to distribute OpenRewrite recipes to large codebases.
While the timeline for .NET support is not yet available, Wilson adds:
Helping customers modernize their .NET applications, and move to running on Open Source .NET on Linux, has also been a multi-year investment. I'm looking forward to seeing how Amazon Q Code Transformation makes modernization even easier for .NET customers.
There are no additional costs for using Code Transformation during the preview but it requires the CodeWhisperer Professional Tier (USD 19/user/month) in the AWS Toolkit for IntelliJ IDEA or the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.
