The transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Developer for .NET, mainframe, and VMware workloads (preview)
Note
The transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Developer are in preview release, and are subject to change.
What are Amazon Q Developer’s transformation capabilities?
Amazon Q Developer’s transformation capabilities can help your enterprise discover, plan, and execute migration and modernization jobs for your legacy applications running on-premises or in the cloud.
Q helps your enterprise modernize and migrate applications, including:
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Mainframe applications (COBOL to Java)
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VMware environments (to Amazon EC2)
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Windows .NET Framework applications (to .NET 8.0+)
Q leverages generative AI to drive the entire transformation journey, from initial assessment and planning to final execution and validation. By minimizing the need for manual effort and specialized expertise, Q allows you to accelerate your cloud adoption and modernization initiatives.
You can also transform your Java 8 or 11 code to Java 17 using the Amazon Q Developer IDE extension.
Prerequisites
This section describes prerequisites for administering the transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Developer in the web experience.
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Add your prospective web experience users to IAM Identity Center. Your web experience users must be registered in IAM Identity Center. For more information, see Connect workforce users in the IAM Identity Center User Guide.
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Set up Amazon Q Developer Pro. For more information, see Setting up access to the Amazon Q Developer Pro tier.
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Add your prospective web experience users as Amazon Q Developer Pro subscribers. For more information, see Setting up access to the Amazon Q Developer Pro tier.
Note
If your Amazon Q Developer Pro administrator assigns subscriptions to users with groups (rather than individually), those subscriptions might not go into effect for up to 24 hours.
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Designate your web experience administrator. The administrator of your Amazon Q Developer transformation web experience is an IAM Identity Center user with permissions from the Amazon Q Developer administrator policy. This could be the same user who acts as your Amazon Q Developer administrator.
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Enable Amazon Q Developer’s transformation capabilities. Sign in to the AWS account from which you administer Amazon Q Developer. (If you are using an organization instance of the IAM Identity Center, then this would be your organization management account.) On the Amazon Q Developer Settings page, enable the web experience.
The console will display your application URL, which your workspace users can use to reach the web experience console.
Now you're ready to set up your workspace.
Setting up your workspace
Amazon Q Developer’s transformation capabilities are designed to enable collaboration, through shared workspaces, between your internal teams. You may also invite external partners, such as system integrators (SIs), to a workspace.
In order to collaborate on a shared workspace, all users, internal and external, must be registered users of the same instance of IAM Identity Center that is associated with your instance of the the Q Developer transform web experience. Once subscribed to Amazon Q Developer Pro, all IAM Identity Center users, even if they don’t have access to a workspace, can sign in to the web experience, and see that a related workspace exists. In such cases, the uninvited user can see the name and membership of the workspace, but not other details such as jobs or artifacts. That user can then request access to any workspace that interests them.
Within each workspace, Amazon Q manages the transformation jobs and their associated tasks, allowing your teams to monitor progress, provide inputs, and review final outcomes. The platform also supports role-based access control, ensuring that team members can only access and interact with the resources to which they are authorized.
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Complete the prerequisites.
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Sign in to the the Q Developer transform web experience as the Amazon Q Developer Pro administrator.
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To sign in, you will need the application URL provided by the Amazon Q Developer console.
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Create a workspace.
Note
When you create a workspace you become the administrator of that workspace.
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Direct your end users sign in to the web experience for the first time. Before you can add a user to your workspace, that user must sign in to the web experience at least once.
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Give your end users access to your workspace. Add users to your workspace. You can only add users who are already subscribed to Amazon Q Developer Pro.
After you add collaborators, select the appropriate role for each one.
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Create your first transformation job You can initiate a new transformation job by describing your desired objectives in natural language. Amazon Q will propose a high-level approach to achieve the specified objectives.
You can iterate on the proposed approach, providing feedback and adjusting the objective as needed. Once the plan is finalized, Q will execute the transformation job, while maintaining visibility and control through periodic check-ins and requests for your approval. If Amazon Q requires your input, you will see a collaborator request.
After Q creates the job, it prompts you to view the job details. Then (for mainframe modernization and .NET porting) it will prompt you to choose a resource to which you can add a connector.
Note
A connector is associated at the workspace and is available for all transformation jobs within the workspace.
You cannot mix connector types within the workspace. For example .NET connectors cannot be created in a workspace with VMware or mainframe jobs.
Terminology
Within this section, italics indicate an official term within the definition of a different term.
- Account connection
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A Q resource that authorizes Q to interact with customer-owned resources in that account. Account in this context is a generalized reference to a container or security boundary for resources in AWS or remote service, for example, an AWS account or GitHub account.
- Artifact
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An output deliverable produced by Q.
- Administrator
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Administrators can read and mutate everything in the workspace. They can begin chats with Amazon Q, start and stop jobs, and upload/download artifacts. Administrators can interact with running jobs for human-in-the-loop (HITL) actions, and can approve critical HITL actions such as merging to main, doing graph decomposition, or deploying code to production environments. Administrators can mutate workspaces, connectors, and users.
- Agent
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A task-specific service that executes a specific transformation type. For example, VMware migrations.
- Approver
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Approver permissions are a super-set of contributor permissions. Approvers can read everything in the workspace, begin chats with Amazon Q, start and stop jobs, and upload or download artifacts. Approvers can interact with running jobs for human-in-the-loop (HITL) actions, and can perform critical HITL actions such as merging to main, doing graph decomposition, or deploying code to production environments. Approvers cannot mutate workspaces, connectors, or users.
- Asset
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Input for a transformation job. For example, customer's source code, server, database, network. Assets are accessed via a connector.
- Collaborator request
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A task in which Q is asking a human to do something.
- Connector
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A Q resource that represents a customer-owned resource in a system external to Q. Connectors are asset providers.
When you set up a connector, the administrator of the account to which you are connecting must accept the connection. In order to accept the connection, they must have permissions given in the connector acceptor policy.
The following two accounts must either be identical, or in the same AWS Organizations organization:
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The account from which the Amazon Q Developer administrator enables the Amazon Q Developer transformation web experience.
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The account that will be on the receiving end of your transformation. This account must be assingned an IAM role that allows it to use a connector.
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- Contributor
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Contributors can read everything in the workspace. They can begin chats with Amazon Q, start and stop jobs, upload or download artifacts, and interact with running jobs for HITL actions. However, they cannot perform critical HITL actions such as merging to main, doing graph decomposition, or deploying code to production environments. Contributors also cannot mutate workspaces, connectors, or users.
- Objective
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A user-defined end state that Q works to reach. This is written in human readable language and is converted to a series of tasks that Q will perform in concert with users when required.
- Job
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A long-running process (weeks/months+) that Q is working on in order to fulfill an objective defined by a user. Made up of multiple tasks and collaborator requests.
- Plan
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A list of tasks that Q undertakes (with help from human users) in pursuit of an objective.
- Reader
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Readers can view the status and outcomes of the mainframe modernization job, but cannot make any changes. They can read everything in the workspace, download artifacts, view jobs, and view human-in-the-loop (HITL) actions. However, readers cannot perform mutating actions or begin chats with Amazon Q.
- Task
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An individual unit of work that is part of a job.
- Worklog
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A log of what actions Q and users have performed as part of a job.
- Workspace
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A Q resource that contains other resources like connectors and jobs. A workspace serves as a permissions boundary.
