Generative AI assisted application migration to AWS

Customers have been migrating applications from on-premises to AWS for several years. With the recent advancements in Generative AI, they are constantly trying to understand how they can make use of its groundbreaking capabilities in all aspects of migrating an application. AWS has a suite of services and features powered by Generative AI that assists you in migrating your applications from on-premises to AWS. This blog gives a high level overview of these capabilities. For learning more about each of these in detail, please refer the respective documentation links embedded.

Planning is a crucial stage for the successful migration of any application at any scale. You might have to dive deep in to the application code and understand dependencies in order to make an effective plan.

Amazon Q Developer can help you understand application code in supported IDEs. This is a conversational experience and you can dive deep in to the code to understand fine details and dependencies.

When it comes to the specific application you are looking to migrate, you need to understand the best AWS services to host them. You also need to know the best practices and pros and cons of different approaches.

Amazon Q Developer can provide you expert assistance for building on AWS. You can chat with Amazon Q from any AWS documentation page or AWS Console or your IDE and ask questions in a conversational manner to understand what is the best way to deploy your application on AWS. You can dive deep on topics and get reference links for the recommendations. Q Developer will also give you best practices to take care of while you build the application on AWS. This makes it easier for you to find the right information faster, significantly reducing the time and effort on effective planning. With this information, you can come up with the approach you will take to migrate. Based on various factors, you can decide to rehost, replatform or refactor the application to AWS.

Q Developer's capabilities are not only relevant during the planning stage, it can be helpful throughout the migration journey and it offers support over the entire SDLC lifecycle.

Based on the approach you have finalized, you need to build and deploy the AWS infrastructure to host the application. Q Developer helps you in developing the Infrastructure as code (IaC) templates across several languages such as CDK, Terraform, JSON and YAML in supported IDEs. You can utilize this feature to come up with the IaC templates in a fraction of the time it will take if you had to develop it from scratch. You can explain what you would like to build in natural language as a comment and Q Developer can generate a boiler plate template giving you a head start in the template development.

After the IaC template development, if you run in to issues while deploying the stack, Q Developer can help you troubleshoot. This can also be used to analyze CloudFormation templates that you already developed or obtained.

Use the Transform capability of Q Developer if you have Windows .NET components in your application that can benefit from migration to Linux. Additionally, this can also help you upgrade Java components, and modernize both VMware and Mainframe applications to AWS.

In many cases, you might have a database that you need to migrate to AWS as part of the overall application migration. AWS DMS is a service that makes it possible to migrate relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other types of data stores to AWS. AWS DMS Schema conversion (DMS SC) is the capability of DMS which supports you in migrations between different types of databases. DMS SC has the ability to improve the database schema conversion process by automatically converting up to 90% of schema objects from commercial databases to PostgreSQL migrations. This helps in speeding up your heterogeneous database migrations to PostgreSQL.

At times, you might launch an EC2 instance or an RDS database from console as part of your migration. Until now, if you had to make this deployment repeatable, you need to write your own IaC template. Amazon Q Developer's Console-to-code feature makes it easier by generating IaC template for manual actions that you performed in AWS console in supported formats (This is available for EC2, VPC and RDS as of the time of writing this).

In any large scale migration, you are bound to run in to issues while doing the migration. This might warrant in-depth troubleshooting or reaching out to AWS support. There could also be features or new capabilities that you need to deploy for the application to work as expected in the AWS cloud environment. AWS has several Gen AI capabilities that you can make use of in these situations.

Amazon Q Developer has a very handy troubleshooting feature in console. If you use AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda in your migrated application, you can benefit from this. The 'Troubleshoot with Q' capability allows you to diagnose most common console errors with Amazon Q, except for simple validation errors.

If you are looking to develop and rollout new features and capabilities during or after the application migration, you can use Amazon Q Developer's feature development functionality with which you can articulate the feature in natural language in your IDE and Q will generate the code for you. This could be in your existing project or a completely new project. In case of existing project, Q analyzes your current codebase to come up with the code for the feature. Q can also help in creating unit tests and reviewing code for issues.

If you use Amazon CodeCatalyst to build and deploy applications, you can enable and use its generative AI capabilities such as assigning issues to Amazon Q, recommending tasks, writing description and creating summary. This allows the developers to complete their tasks faster.

If you need to get support from AWS at any stage of migrating the application, Amazon Q Developer makes it easier with its Chat with Support feature. If you have any AWS support plan other than the 'Basic Support', Q can draft a support case with the issue details from your ongoing chat with it. The information will be auto-populated in relevant fields in the support case. It can then transfer you to a Support agent on your preferred contact method. If you only have the Basic Support plan, Q Developer will suggest available channels to get support, such as AWS re:Post.

In this blog, we looked at various Generative AI capabilities that AWS offers to support you in your application migration journey. These capabilities save a significant amount of time and effort in all phases of migration. The list of Gen AI capabilities at your disposal is only going to grow. Do make use of these to successfully migrate your applications to AWS.

Happy Migrating!!