AWS has recently announced the general availability of Amazon Q a generative AI-powered assistant tailored for businesses and developers. Amazon Q Developer provides code suggestions and recommendations in real time, while Amazon Q Business enables companies to get insights from structured and unstructured data.
Announced in preview at re:Invent, Amazon Q Business is a generative AI–powered assistant capable of answering questions, providing summaries, generating content, and completing tasks based on customers’ data and information. The general availability introduces new features, including custom plugins, as well as a preview of Amazon Q Apps, a feature enabling the creation of generative AI-powered sharable applications using natural language. Channy Yun, principal developer advocate at AWS, writes:
Amazon Q Business connects seamlessly to over 40 popular enterprise data sources and stores document and permission information, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Microsoft 365, and Salesforce. It ensures that you access content securely with existing credentials using single sign-on, according to your permissions, and also includes enterprise-level access controls.
By directing Amazon Q Business towards enterprise data repositories, users can ask a web-based chat assistant to answer inquiries regarding company policies, products, business results, or code.
Source: AWS Blog
In a distinct announcement, AWS revealed the general availability of Amazon Q Developer. Formerly known as Amazon CodeWhisperer and primarily focused on generating code suggestions, Q Developer has evolved into a managed service aimed at enabling developers to dedicate more time to coding and less to maintenance tasks. Donnie Prakoso, principal developer advocate at AWS, explains:
Trained on 17 years of AWS knowledge and experience, this generative artificial intelligence (generative AI)–powered assistant helps me build applications on AWS, research best practices, perform troubleshooting, and resolve errors.
According to the documentation, Amazon Q Developer does not have complete visibility into the resources in the account. Still, it can list and describe certain resources, such as S3 buckets or EC2 instances. It currently cannot provide billing information, but it can now help retrieve and analyze cost data from Cost Explorer. Furthermore, Amazon Q Developer can help diagnose common errors in the S3, EC2, Lambda, and ECS service consoles.
Explaining how to accelerate software development and leverage business data with generative AI assistance from Amazon Q, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president at AWS, writes:
Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities can autonomously perform a range of tasks–everything from implementing features, documenting, and refactoring code, to performing software upgrades. Starting today, you can also ask Q Developer questions about your AWS account (preview) like "What instances are currently running in us-east-1?" or "What is my S3 bucket encryption?" or "What were my EC2 costs by region last month?"
On HackerNews, initial feedback has been mixed, with several users noting the simultaneous release of similar products by Microsoft (Copilot Workspace) and Amazon during the same week. Jeremy Daly, CEO and founder of Ampt, comments:
If you look up "going all in on AI" in the dictionary, it might just point you to these two announcements. (...) Amazon Q Business being able to integrate with and ask natural language questions to other enterprise systems could dramatically increase productivity. Plus, the work they've done on minimizing hallucinations means you might even be able to trust the responses.
Amazon Q Business is generally available in Northern Virginia and Oregon regions, offering two subscription options: Business Lite at $3 per user per month and Business Pro at $20 per user per month. A free trial (50 users for 60 days) is also available. Conversely, Amazon Q Developer provides a free tier along with a Pro version priced at $19 per month per user.
Other AWS services announced the general availability of their Amazon Q features: according to the cloud provider, the generative BI capabilities of Amazon Q in QuickSight help business analysts build and consume insights using natural language, while Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue helps build data integration pipelines.
