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#719: AWS News: Amazon Q Developer brings powerful new AI capabilities to GitLab Duo
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Description: Learn how you can use the all new Amazon Q Developer integration with GitLab Duo to aut
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A
This is episode 719 of the AWS.
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Podcast, released on May 5, 2025.
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A
Hello everyone and welcome back to the AWS Podcast. I'm Alicia with you. Great to have you back. A little under the weather as you can tell, but it's adding bass to the voice which is okay. But we have multi AZs. We don't have Shruti today, but we do have Gillian Ford. G'day, Gillian. How you doing?
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B
I'm feeling well. I don't have a radio voice like you do right now, but I'm always excited for.
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A
I know I need a filter that brings this all the time without the feeling terrible part. So there's lots of, lots of cool new stuff that's happening this time round. And we're going to start with one that's a little different, which is a new benchmark. This is called the SWE Poly Bench, which is a multilingual benchmark for AI coding agents. And it answers the interesting question of how do you know how good your agent is in doing the coding work? You're asking. So Jillian, what's this, what's this giving us? What's it bringing to the table?
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B
Wow, it is like super cool. So this is the first industry benchmark to evaluate AI coding agents ability to navigate and understand complex code bases. So that also includes rich metrics to advanced AI performance. And these are in real world scenarios. So I think this is totally applicable to customers that really want to be able to start using this today.
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A
Yeah, I think what's interesting is it's trying to sort of figure out what does good look like. So for example, you know, if you're using Java, this, this benchmark does 165 different tasks. There's a over a thousand JavaScript tasks, so over 700 TypeScript tasks, almost 200 Python tasks. And what it's done is sort of tried to apply a variety of different things like fixing a bug or doing a feature request or doing some code, refactoring, et cetera. And then it creates a leaderboard that lets you actually see, well, what's good at doing what things and how good is it and what fits better. And I think this is what's really reflecting the fact that it depends continues to be the primary answer to all solutions to all things, which is, you know, which model do I use and which agent works better with which particular language. Now just because something works really well when you're using JavaScript, so front end coding doesn't mean it'll work well if you're doing let's say Python on the back end example. So I think this is going to be really interesting to see how the data set builds out over time.
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Yeah, it is. And I think one thing that stood out to me was this task specialization. Like these different agents, they show strengths in various task categories. So bug fixes, feature requests, refactoring, and now this is just like one finding that you're able to utilize within these coding agents.
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A
Yeah, it's a very powerful thing. And continuing on with the theme of agents making software development better. And look, lots of people have opinions on whether AI coding and software development this way is better or worse or how you assess it. I'll give you my personal take. It's like speaking with a megaphone. So you still have to speak, but when you're holding a megaphone up, it reaches further and you can get a lot more coverage done. And so I'm finding it as an accelerant. And one of the things we want to Talk about is GitLab duo with Amazon Q. So this means that you can now use the agents within that GitLab quick action space. I know a lot of my customers use GitLab. It's a very popular thing certainly over here in Australia. And you can have it analyze your entire code base. You can generate code, you can look into issues, you can provide context on sources, you can do code reviews as well. It can really help with that. There's a, there's a bunch of stuff here, Gillian, to really get your teeth into.
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B
Yeah, I'm really excited about the automated security vulnerability and code quality checks especially. I work with startups, I get it. Security oftentimes becomes a less of a priority thing because you've got to go quickly to market. And I just love anything that can kind of help, really automate it and make it much faster to implement best practices.
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A
Yeah, everyone wants to go quickly and skip security till something goes wrong and then everything stops. And so it's like, you know, that's why the grizzly old heads go, well, you do security for goodness sake at the start, but this, again, this makes it easier to at least get a good run at it and to have at least got the basics done. You know, we still see code out there that, you know, has SQL injection vulnerabilities and all this other stuff that, you know, if you don't know, you don't know. So the LLMs know and can help us with that.
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B
Absolutely.
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So let's talk about some things that have been happening out there. Let's start with the world of analytics, Amazon Redshift now supports history mode for zero ETL integrations with eight third party applications including Salesforce, ServiceNow and SAP. In summary, this means that you can now do historically based analytics without any multi copies of data and lots of different processing. It makes life a lot easier, which is very cool. We're also announcing Serverless Reservations which is a new discounted pricing option for Amazon Redshift Serverless. So if you have consistent workloads or a baseline workload, you know you can now save up to 24% on your cost allocation and you can commit to a number of processing units and you can have a no upfront option that gives you a 20% discount or an all up front option that gives you a 24% discount. Again, the pay as you go pay for what you use model is great, it's my preferred model, but if you have an understanding of base load you should always go for these prepaid options because you will save money off the bat if you know what it is. We're also happy to introduce a guided visual pipeline builder for Amazon OpenSearch ingestion. So this is an enhancement to allow you to have automatic permission creation enhanced real time validation to just make that pipeline processing easier to set up. And the Amazon OpenSearch service also now supports SAML single sign on for OpenSearch UI as well. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams has increased the default shard limits up to 20,000 per AWS account. That's up from 500. So it's a pretty significant thing for provision capacity mode and it applies for US East, US West, Oregon and Europe Ireland as well. And Amazon MSK has added support for Apache Kafka version 3.9. So this specifically allows you to retain tiered data when disabling tiered storage at the topic level. So it's kind of an important thing. Plus various bug fixes and improvements and I think is one of the few times this week I'll be able to remind you to patch your stuff if you're not keeping up to date with things. Please do. Makes life better for everyone.
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B
It never gets old when you tell people to patch your.
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Well, because I know for a fact there's always going to be one list that goes oh damn it, he's right, there's something we need to patch. I think that's a good thing.
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Yeah. Onto application integration Amazon SQS now supports IPv6 for API requests, enabling you to communicate with SQS using IPv6, IPv4 or dual stack clients using public endpoints. Amazon announces quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto long term supported and feature release versions of Open jdk. Next topic is Artificial Intelligence. Now we've got the well architected Generative AI lens. Super exciting. So this new lens is a powerful addition to the well architected framework. It's designed to guide organizations through the complexities of implementing generative AI workloads. It provides structured prescriptive guidance covering the entire generative AI lifecycle, whether that's from the initial impact scoping to model selection, customization, integration, deployment and continuous iteration. The lens offers several key benefits including cloud agnostic guidance applicable across various environments and AI tools and it covers all six well architected pillars and it's flexible application for organizations at any stage of their AI journey, enables thorough assessment of architectures using LLMs Large language models and helps business leaders and data scientists navigate critical decisions in generative AI implementation. Definitely recommend it so you can check it out in the lens catalog of the AWS well architected tool. If you've actually never used the well architected tool, you literally just go into the AWS console, do a search for well architected and there's a number of different lenses. There's the good old fashioned well architected that is timeless and then there's a bunch of different lenses for a wide variety of use cases such as SaaS for one example. So you definitely want to check that out as you're thinking about well architected best practices and maybe for specific areas like generative AI. Never gets old. Next up, Amazon Bedrock Data Automation now supports modality enablement, modality routing by file type, extraction of embedded hyperlinks when processing documents in standard output, and an increased overall document page limit of 3,000 pages. These new features give you more control over how your multimodal content is processed and improve Bedrock Data Automation's overall date document extraction capabilities. Prompt optimization in Amazon Bedrock is now generally available with prompt optimization in Amazon Bedrock you can now automatically rewrite prompts for better performance and and more concise responses on anthropic, Llama, Nova, DeepSeq, Mistral, and Titan models. You can compare optimize prompts against original versions without deployment and save them in Amazon Bedrock. Prompt Management for prompt lifecycle management, you can also use prompt optimization in the Bedrock Playground or directly via API. Amazon Bedrock Intelligent prompt routing is now generally available, so intelligent prompt routing is this is going to be able to allow you to configure your router by choosing any two models from a model family and setting the routing criteria for your router. Prompt routing also adds support for new models and now supports the following so the anthropic Claude model so haiku haiku 3.5 Claude Sonnet 3.5 version 1 and Claud Sonnet 3.5 version 2 the metal llama family model so llama 3.18B 70B, 3.2.11B, 90B and 3370B and the Amazon Noma family, the Nova Pro and the Nova Lite. Amazon Bedrock Rag and Model Evaluations now support custom metrics Bedrock Evaluations offers human based evals, programmatic evals such as BERT score, F1 and other exact Match metrics as well as LLM as a judge for both model and Rag evaluation For both model and Rag evaluation With LLM as a judge, customers can select from an extensive list of built in metrics such as correctness, completeness, faithfulness, hallucination detection as well as responsible AI metrics such as answer refusal, harmfulness and stereotyping. Amazon SageMaker LakeHouse now supports attribute based Access Control using AWS Identity and Access Management Principle and session tags to simplify data access, grant creation and maintenance. AWS announces upgrades to Amazon Q business integrations for Microsoft 365, Word and Outlook. AWS announces the update of Amazon Q Developer Software Development Agent. This new agent achieves state of the art performance on industry benchmark SWT Bench Verified and sits among the top ranking models on SWE Bench Verified. The agent has access to tools for planning and reasoning that use the capacity of advanced models to their fullest.
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A
Yeah, I've been, I've been making this one do a lot of heavy lifting for me, let me tell you.
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Ooh, like what?
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Well, it's interesting. I'm. I'm building more things I'm not using. Oh, now that sounds, that sounds counterintuitive, but what it means is I'm able to try more ideas with lower overhead. In fact, as a step beyond Vibe coding, which I'm not a fan of, I'm now doing background coding. So during a meeting, if the meeting is maybe a little inefficient in terms of the use of my time, it may be happening in the back end that I'm also having a dialogue with my trusty Q agent that is building something that I thought might be an interesting idea and just seeing how far I can go and what it can come up with and if it makes sense or if I run into any bumps and edges. So if you think about in the classic sort of real agile view of the world where you spike Ideas and try things, et cetera. This allows me to do that at very low opportunity cost. So, yes, background, background. And then I tried to use it to build me something that would actually do it in the background for me automatically using voice, which I think I may have mentioned the last episode, and it didn't work. And I'm okay with that because I didn't spend four weeks trying to make the thing work. It was literally a few hours and not, not, not dedicated hours to just test it out.
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So I think we're going to have so many listeners in the background that are going to be having their AI agent doing some things along the T in the background from hearing your inspiration.
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Great. I'm not organizing this as a production grade development process. I'm simply saying often, often as technologists, we have a lot of bright, interesting ideas. We think, oh, it'd be great to have time. And you know, I don't know about you, but I ended up spending the weekend or the night doing that. And on the one hand that's great, but it gets kind of old after a while. So it's like, well, if I can do it while something else is happening and have it do it, because you need focus to code and you need flow and that doesn't go away. But if you kind of know what you're trying to get to, you can kind of have the bot go do it for you and then you can just assess the results and go, it looks pretty good. It might be worth me actually spending some time on this. Just a perspective.
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I think a lot of people are inspired. And speaking of more inspiring things. AWS healthomics Announces Workflow Versioning Support AWS healthomics now supports elastic throughput for dynamic run storage.
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Let's talk about compute. A lot of lot of AI things, but there's also lots of compute things happening as well. We're happy to announce the general availability of the EC2 C8GD instances, the M8GD instances and the R8GD instances. These have up to 11.4 TB of local NVME based SSD block level storage. I'm sorry, I'm old. I still find these numbers insane. That used to be what I called an enterprise database and now it's the internal RAM of an SSD device. These have AWS Graviton 4 processors, so up to 30% better price performance over Graviton 3. And so you're already getting a benefit there. And up to 40% higher performance for IO intensive workloads and 20% faster query results as well compared to Atomos Graviton 3 they use Nitro which is all kinds of goodness. 12 different instance types. They're currently available in US East Ohio and North Virginia and US West Oregon. If you're in those regions and you use this type of compute, you should definitely assess this to see if it's an improvement. This is again one of the best ways to get benefit is to reassess your EC2 instances. AWS Thinkbox deadline 4.3.10 is now generally available with support for managing Deadline Cloud usage based licensing together with your existing floating licenses and Atomus. Deadline Cloud now provides a macOS installer for submitters, so this is a fully managed service that simplifies render management for teams creating computer generated graphics and visual effects. And yes, having a macOS installer for integrated submitters is a good thing for them. The AWS Console Mobile application adds Support for Amazon LightSail, so if you need to manage your LightSail instances, that is the place to do it. And AWS Batch now supports Amazon Elastic Container Service Exec and AWS Filens Log Router, so now you can track the progress of your application and troubleshoot issues by running interactive commands against the containers in your AWS batch job. I can see that would be very useful. An AWS file lens I've not come across that myself allows you to stream logs from your AWS batch jobs to your chosen destinations, including Amazon CloudWatch S3 OpenSearch service Redshift, and also partners like Splunk and many more.
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Now we'll talk about Contact Centers, also known as the Amazon Connect Update segment. I'm just naming that right now because there's always so many things from the Amazon Connect team every time.
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They're always busy.
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They really are, such as the Agent Workspace, which now supports additional capabilities for third party applications, including the ability to make outbound calls, accept transfer and clear contacts, and update agent status. Amazon Connect Cases now provides capabilities to help contact centers track and meet SLAs on cases. Amazon Connect Contact Lens Dashboards now supports the ability for contact center administrators to enforce granular access control based on a specific agent hierarchy. We've got one quick update in containers. Amazon ECS is introducing a new Account Setting Default Log Driver mode, which allows you to define whether tasks in your account use blocking or non blocking log driver mode by default when you do not specify or omit it in your application's task definitions.
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Let's talk about databases. We're happy to announce AWS DMS Serverless Automatic Storage Scaling so now you never have to worry about exceeding the DMS serverless 100 gig default replication storage capacity limit because it handles it for you. So now basically there is no storage capacity limit, it just happens for you. Well done team. I like this one. This is a good one for customers. Amazon MemoryDB now supports IPv6 so you can use it for IPv6, IPv6 and IPv4 as well. So the year of IPv6 continues to march on. Let's have a quick update for front end web and mobile AWS AppSync events now supports data source integrations for channel namespaces. So this is a fully managed Service for serverless WebSocket APIs with full connection management and it now supports those data source integrations so you can associate AWS lambda functions, AWS DynamoDB tables, Aurora databases and other data sources with channel namespace handlers to process published events and subscription requests. Developers can now connect directly to lambda functions without writing code and leverage both request response and event modes for synchronous and asynchronous operations. This is actually really useful and I could have used this about a month ago.
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Next up Management and governance AWS app Config now supports dual stack endpoints facilitating connectivity through IPv6. Amazon CloudWatch agent support for Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS enables monitoring of applications and infrastructure using familiar CloudWatch tools such as container insights and application signals. Amazon CloudWatch agent adds support for Selinux or Security Enhanced Linux environments through a preconfigured security policy that allows monitoring in systems where security enforcement is required. Amazon Managed service for Prometheus now supports label based Active Series limits. AWS now allows customers in Europe to pay for their usage in advance. How exciting. AWS announced three updates to enhance your experience with the Customer Carbon Footprint tool. These updates include easier access to carbon emissions data, visibility into emissions by AWS region, and an updated independently verified methodology. We've got one topic in migration and transfer. AWS Transfer Family introduces Terraform module for deploying SFTP server endpoints. Now onto networking and content delivery where We've also got one quick update. Amazon Cloudfront announces Anycast Static IP's support for Apex domains.
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This is a big deal in terms of the fact that previously you had to have 21 IP addresses to make this work and now you have three network managers of the world unite. Celebrate. Let's talk about security, identity and compliance. AWS Resource groups now supports 160 more resource types and yes, I will not read them all to you now if you don't have used AWS Resource groups, it lets you model, manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources using tags, remember those to logically group your resources. So it really helps you operate at scale and AWS Resource Explorer now supports AWS Private Link, so it means you can operate across and within your virtual private cloud without traversing the public Internet. AWS Account Management now supports IAM based account name updates. Ooh, this is a good one. So this is a new API that's added to the Account Management API that lets AWS organizations customers to centrally and programmatically manage primary email addresses, primary contact information, alternate contact information and AWS regions for their accounts. With using this new API, you no longer need root access to manage your account names. You'll be able to authorize IAM principles within the account and you can also use it to manage delegated accounts and create basically a centralized way of working. I'm unreasonably excited about this change because I know this has been what I would call a significant paper cut for a lot of customers for a long time and so this is now fixing that, which is fantastic. Amazon Cognito now supports refresh token rotation for user pool clients. So Refresh tokens are long lived tokens that allow applications to obtain new access tokens without requiring users to sign in again. You can now configure it to automatically replace your existing refresh tokens with a new one at regular intervals, which can improve your application security posture. AWS Security Incident Response now supports integration with AWS Private Link and Amazon Verified Permissions now supports Policy Store deletion protection. So now the Policy store cannot be deleted by any user. So again you can have resilience so that your production policy stores aren't accidentally deleted during deployments, which would be bad. And AWS STS Global Endpoint now serves your request locally in regions enabled by default. So this is for the AWS Security Token service and basically it will serve all requests that go to the Global endpoint which is sts.amazonaws.com to the same AWS region as your deployed workloads, so previously would all be served from US East North Virginia. Now it will actually allow you to have significant fault isolation because requests are processed in the same region as your workloads. Now this update is available in all AWS regions that are enabled by default and you don't have to do anything any requests for the STS Global Endpoint from regions not enabled by default, so opt in regions will continue to be served from US East North Virginia let's quickly talk about serverless AWS Lambda now supports inbound IPv6 connectivity over AWS Private link. So we've got both the IPv6 support and the Private link support in the same update. Well done team. Amazon EventBridge now supports customer managed keys in API destinations connections and the Amazon Eventbridge connector for Apache Kafka Connect is now generally available. The connector includes built in support for Kafka Schema Registries which offloads large Event payloads to S3, which is a good thing, and IAM role based authentication and it's available under the Apache 2.0 license in the AWS GitHub organization. And finally, as we always do, let's wrap up with storage. Amazon S3 Tables now supports server side encryption using AWS KMS with customer managed keys. By default, S3 Tables encrypt all objects with server side encryption using S3 managed keys. Now you can have custom managed keys to do the same thing. And Amazon EBS now supports additional resource level permissions for copying EBS snapshots, so you can copy any snapshot accessible to you to another region or account, including snapshots created by you or shared by you. With this launch you now have more granular controls to set resource level permissions about who can do what. And that is always a good thing. So some cool updates there, Gillian. I think it was plenty for everyone depending on which side of the fence you sit in terms of job, function, role or interests.
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Absolutely. I mean not that you were asking what my favorite was, but if you were to ask.
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I kind of was if I wanted to ask that question. What would your favorite one be?
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Well, I think the launch of the new instances. I mean new graviton 4 instances C8G D now the MAGD, the R8G D. I mean why not always pick like the most up to date most performant instance type. Right. For the lowest cost.
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Yep, it's nice. And look, it's either a stop and a start of your application or it's even better. A rolling upgrade on your auto scaling group and life is better.
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Yeah. What about you? What stood out?
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Well, if you were to ask me, mine was, mine was actually the STS Global Endpoint update. I think that's a, that's a really big deal in terms of resilience and I'm always a big fan of resilience and I love the fact that it's enhancing resilience and your code change level is zero, so don't have to change the endpoint don't have to do anything. It just betterer and betterer is gooderer. So I'm very happy with that. So there's some, some good ones there. Jillian, how do folks get in touch with you if they want to reach out?
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Jillian Ford on LinkedIn.
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Fantastic. And if you want to go old school, aws podcast@Amazon.com is the place to do it as well. And until next time, keep on building.