Accelerating .NET Modernization with Amazon Q Developer

Key Takeaways

1. Customers are moving away from Windows to Linux to reduce licensing costs, improve performance, and simplify operational overhead.
2. The journey of modernizing .NET applications involves analyzing, transforming, and validating the code to make it Linux-ready.
3. Amazon Q Developer provides a centralized experience for migrating and modernizing .NET applications, leveraging generative AI capabilities.
4. The transformation process in Amazon Q Developer follows a tri-stage approach: analyze, modify, and verify, with a self-debugging capability.
5. Amazon Q Developer supports porting .NET Framework applications to .NET 8 and provides options to maintain .NET Standard projects for backwards compatibility.
6. For large-scale modernization efforts, Amazon Q Developer offers a web-based experience that allows IT admins and DevOps teams to connect to their source code repositories, analyze, transform, and commit the changes to a new branch for review and deployment.
7. The solution provides transparency through dashboards and audit trails, enabling human supervision and control throughout the transformation process.
8. Customers have reported up to 4x acceleration in the porting process and significant licensing cost savings by moving from Windows to Linux-ready .NET applications.

Modernizing .NET Applications: The Journey

1. Motivation for Moving to Linux

   • Reduce licensing costs (up to 40% savings)
   • Improve performance (1.5-2x faster than Windows)
   • Simplify operational overhead and maintenance

2. Transformation Approaches

   • Rearchitecting: Porting from .NET Framework to cross-platform .NET
   • Advantages:
     • Cross-platform deployment flexibility
     • Higher performance
     • Reduced operational overhead
     • Easier transition to microservices
     • Community support for cross-platform .NET

3. Typical .NET Porting Process

   • Analyzing code for incompatibilities
   • Manually transforming the code
   • Validating organizational readiness, security, and resilience
   • Deploying and running the workloads in the target environment
   • Challenges:
     • Error-prone manual process
     • Collaboration and coordination across teams
     • Dealing with application dependencies

Amazon Q Developer: Transformation Capabilities for .NET

1. Centralized Experience for Migration and Modernization

   • Leverages foundational large language models and domain-expert AI agents
   • Augments your teams with domain expertise and supervision capabilities

2. Tri-stage Transformation Process

   • Analyze: Identify incompatibilities using a .NET porting knowledge base
   • Modify: Generate replacement code to work in the new .NET versions
   • Verify: Validate the transformed code and provide self-debugging capabilities

3. Evaluation Criteria

   • Successful porting of code with incompatibilities
   • Consistent transformation across projects

4. Supported Scenarios

   • .NET Framework to .NET 8 porting
   • Maintaining .NET Standard projects for backwards compatibility

5. Large-scale Modernization Experience

   • Web-based experience for IT admins and DevOps teams
   • Connect to source code repositories and transform applications in bulk
   • Provide human supervision and control throughout the process
   • Dashboards and audit trails for visibility and transparency

Customer Testimonials

1. Signicat Group: "We have received acceleration benefits from using Amazon Q Developer's transformation capabilities for our .NET applications."
2. Cockroach Labs: "Amazon Q Developer has helped us port our .NET applications to Linux efficiently and effectively."

Conclusion and Next Steps

• Amazon Q Developer brings a centralized and powerful solution for modernizing .NET applications from Windows to Linux.
• The transformation capabilities leverage generative AI to augment your teams and provide human-supervised, scalable, and transparent modernization experiences.
• Join the workshop tomorrow at noon to experience the product firsthand and provide feedback.