‘An Easy Button to Get Off Windows’: Amazon's New AI Moves Microsoft Apps to Linux
upstart writes:
'Amazon has a new use for AI: dumping Microsoft Windows:
At the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference Tuesday morning, the company announced a series of new features for Amazon Q Developer, its AI assistant for software development, including one that uses AI to help companies migrate legacy Microsoft .NET applications to Linux.
The move could boost Amazon's cloud business by reducing a major hurdle for customers to move away from data centers and servers running on Microsoft's operating system.
"Customers would love an 'easy button' to get off Windows," said AWS CEO Matt Garman, announcing the initiative on stage here Tuesday morning, along with an array of new products and features across Amazon's cloud business.
Although the AI twist is new, the push to help customers move workloads away from Windows and into Amazon's cloud has been a longstanding quest for AWS, stretching back to current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's past tenure as the leader of the company's cloud unit.
[...] The new Amazon Q .NET-to-Linux feature uses AI agents to examine files designated by a developer for migration, identify software components that need to be upgraded, create a transformation plan, and execute the plan by upgrading code and configuration files, among other steps.
Based on the experience of customers who've been testing the tool, Amazon says AI could reduce the migration process from months to days, and save up to 40% in costs due to the shift away from Microsoft's traditional licensing model.
[...] In addition, the company announced new Amazon Q capabilities that use AI to help developers automatically generate unit tests, keep documentation up-to-date, and provide efficient code reviews. The idea is to remove much of the grunt work from developers' day-to-day work, making Amazon Q more than just a coding assistant.
"We've been taking a very intentional, broad approach," said Adnan Ijaz, director of product management for Amazon Q Developer, in an interview at re:Invent.
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