Streamlining software development across Amazon.com with Amazon Q (AMZ202)

Here is a detailed summary of the video transcription in markdown format, broken into sections for better readability. The key takeaways are highlighted without losing important details.

Introduction

  • Kiran Kumar Chandrakar, Senior Solutions Architect for Strategic Accounts at AWS, and Lilia Borova, Product Manager for Developer Experience at Prime Video, are presenting the session.
  • AWS evolved from Amazon, and today Amazon is using AWS services, including Amazon Q Developer.
  • They will discuss the journey of Q Developer adoption at Prime Video.

Developers as the Main Customer

  • As the Product Manager for Developer Experience, Lilia sees developers as her main customers.
  • Her team focuses on developer experience and productivity metrics, such as deployment velocity and average number of code reviews.
  • Developers reported being able to code less than 1 hour per day on average, which is a common pain point across many companies.
  • The goal is to enable developers to spend more time solving problems creatively with code, and this is where Q Developer comes in.

Q Developer and Amazon's Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

  • Q Developer supports all development tasks, including building on AWS, and integrates seamlessly into the application development lifecycle.
  • Q Developer comes with security and privacy in mind, making it easier for organizations to trust and use generative AI-based tools.
  • Amazon follows a traditional SDLC, but they want to flip the equation and automate tasks to give more time to developers for creating solutions.
  • The key challenges in accelerating SDLC include cross-functional coordination, infrastructure complexity, testing at scale, and balancing speed with control and compliance requirements.
  • Q Developer helps Amazon address these challenges and accelerate their SDLC.

Q Developer's Role in SDLC Phases

  1. Planning: Q Developer is available on the AWS Management Console, AWS Documentation, and supports natural language interactions to help with AWS planning and aligning business objectives with technology.
  2. Create: Q Developer acts as a coding companion in the IDE and CLI, simplifying coding tasks, providing automation, and offering customized suggestions based on Amazon's codebase.
  3. Test and Secure: Q Developer generates comprehensive unit tests, integration tests, and identifies security vulnerabilities, helping improve code quality and coverage.
  4. Operate: Q Developer is available in the IDE and on the AWS Console to help with troubleshooting, debugging, and optimizing AWS resources and costs.
  5. Maintain and Modernize: Q Developer's code transformation agent helps with language and framework upgrades, such as the migration from Java 8 to Java 17.

Prime Video's Q Developer Adoption Journey

  • Prime Video is a massive service with millions of subscribers across 200+ countries, offering a vast catalog, linear and live sports offerings, and over 100 paid add-on subscriptions.
  • Prime Video started with a pilot program of 100 developers to experiment with Q Developer, primarily using it for unit test generation.
  • The early results were encouraging, and Prime Video expanded the program, leveraging Q Developer's customization features and seeing an increase in suggestion acceptance rates.
  • As Q Developer matured, Prime Video developers started using it across more complex use cases, including test-driven development and infrastructure refactoring.
  • Q Developer became an accelerator not just for development velocity but also for learning, helping developers plan new projects, onboard to new codebases, and explore architectural approaches.
  • Prime Video has seen improvements in metrics like development velocity and code change velocity, leading to a wider adoption of Q Developer.

Amazon's Strategic Use of Q Developer for Java Migrations

  • Amazon used Q Developer's code transformation feature to migrate tens of thousands of production applications from Java 8 to Java 17.
  • This migration resulted in 4,500 years of development work saved and $260 million in annual cost savings due to performance improvements.
  • Amazon strategically approached this migration, considering the advantages of upgrading to Java 17, such as increased performance, improved security, and better integration with modern toolkits and libraries.
  • Manually performing this migration would have been a time-consuming task, requiring extensive research, code updates, and debugging.
  • Q Developer's code transformation agent simplified the process by leveraging its knowledge base, automatically applying the necessary changes, and handling any errors.
  • Amazon was able to migrate 1,000 applications from Java 8 to Java 17 in just two days, with an average of 10 minutes per application, compared to the 2-4 person-days typically required for a manual migration.

Conclusion

  • Prime Video's journey with Q Developer has been transformative, and they continue to find new ways to leverage the tool to improve developer productivity and experience.
  • Amazon's strategic use of Q Developer's code transformation feature for Java migrations has resulted in significant time and cost savings, demonstrating the power of AI-powered tools in accelerating software development.

Your Digital Journey deserves a great story.

Build one with us.

Cookies Icon

These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with this website and allow us to remember you. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, as well as for analytics.

If you decline, your information won’t be tracked when you visit this website. A single cookie will be used in your browser to remember your preference.

Talk to us