Although they want to move away from these technologies, modernising them can take months or years of tedious work. As a result, organisations stall or postpone projects entirely, to prioritise building new applications and experiences.

Many used Amazon Q Developer makes these kinds of projects easier by using AI-powered agents to automate the heavy lifting involved in upgrading and modernising complex and time-consuming application migration and modernisation projects, saving customers and partners time and money.

Earlier this year, Amazon used Amazon Q Developer to migrate tens of thousands of production applications from older versions of Java to Java 17. This effort saved more than 4,500 years of development work and achieved performance improvements of $260 million in annual cost savings.

AWS announced today at its Re:Invent 2024 event in Las Vegas that it is extending this technology to support more large-scale legacy transformation projects.

The new capabilities for Amazon Q Developer are designed to help customers:

• Modernise Windows .NET applications to Linux up to four times faster and reduce licensing costs by up to 40%.
• Transform VMware workloads to cloud-native architectures, converting on-premises network configurations into AWS equivalents in hours instead of weeks.
• Accelerate mainframe modernisation by streamlining labour-intensive work such as code analysis, documentation, planning, and refactoring applications.

“We are combining Amazon Q Developer with our nearly two decades of experience helping organisations migrate and modernise their legacy workloads on AWS to accelerate and simplify largescale transformations,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of Technology, at AWS. “This is a game-changer for customers and partners looking to move off Windows .NET, VMware, and mainframes. Amazon Q significantly speeds up application transformation projects with agents that can autonomously complete some of the most labour-intensive tasks, such as analysing, planning, code generation, and testing, saving customers time and money, and helping them realise the full value of the cloud.”

The three capabilities are available through a new Amazon Q Developer web application. The VMware and mainframe modernisation capabilities are only available through this new experience, while developers can also perform Windows .NET transformations within their IDE.

Modernise Windows .NET applications up to four times faster: Organisations today want to accelerate their modernisation from Windows .NET Framework to cross-platform Windows .NET  on Linux for reduced licensing costs, enhanced security, optimised performance, and to simplify the adoption of modern development practices. With Amazon Q, customers and partners can modernise .NET applications from Windows to Linux to realise up to a 40% reduction in licensing costs.

Transform VMware workloads: As organisations exit data centres, one of the key workloads they want to modernise quickly is VMware. Amazon Q simplifies and speeds up the transformation of VMware workloads to AWS, helping them benefit from improved security and resilience. Amazon Q uses agents to automatically identify dependencies and create a plan to modernise workloads in waves, accomplishing in minutes what could take weeks. Amazon Q agents also convert on-premises networking configurations to AWS networking equivalents in hours instead of weeks, compared to traditional manual approaches.

Accelerate mainframe migrations: One of the most complex systems preventing organisations from moving away from data centres is mainframes. Amazon Q now streamlines the labour-intensive work, such as code analysis, documentation, planning, and refactoring applications, involved in mainframe modernisation projects, starting with IBM z/OS mainframes. Amazon Q agents can assist with a range of modernisation tasks, such as automatically generating documentation for COBOL code and quickly decomposing monolithic applications into components that are ready to be moved to AWS.