Dive Brief:
- AWS rolled out a set of generative AI agents designed to ease enterprise migrations from Windows operating systems, VMware virtual machines and mainframe environments Tuesday at its annual re:Invent conference.
- “Customers would love an 'easy button' to get off of Windows,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said, speaking during the event’s keynote address. “They're tired of constant security issues, the constant patching, all the scalability challenges that they have to deal with, and they definitely hate the onerous licensing costs.”
- Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for .NET, mainframe and VMware workloads is designed to help developers migrate Windows applications to Linux, shift VMware deployments to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud environments and automate legacy code analysis, the company said in a Tuesday announcement.
Dive Insight:
As generative AI opened a new front in the battle for cloud dominance, AWS has been rattling its sabers.
Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS parent company Amazon and former division head, said the company had released “nearly twice as many machine learning and GenAI features as the other leading cloud providers combined,” speaking during an Oct. 31 earnings call.
Volume may be less important than utility as enterprises search the AI vendor landscape for business solutions, process improvements and substantive ROI. Agentic tools that automate coding tasks and ease application modernization represent the latest category of use cases with enterprise potential.
“Agents can materially reduce a lot of the time that's spent on important but maybe undifferentiated tasks and allow developers to spend more time on value-added activities,” Garman said Tuesday.
But AWS isn’t the only hyperscaler touting the technology. Last month, Google Cloud introduced an AI agent ecosystem and marketplace to help partners build and deploy agentic solutions and Microsoft expanded its portfolio of Copilot-based AI agents.
Amazon unveiled the Q app development toolkit in July. The capabilities Garman announced this week are designed to drive on-prem workloads to cloud and lure customers away from other providers.
“Windows is not the only legacy platform at a data center that's slowing down modernization efforts,” Garman said. “More and more, as we talk to customers, they're really wanting to get out of data centers entirely.”
AWS infrastructure continues to support VMware workloads in the cloud. The two companies expanded their partnership with the release Sunday of Amazon Elastic VMware Service in preview, a solution to help customers deploy VMware Cloud Foundation in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
“Many customers are actually happy for a portion of their existing VMware workloads to stay running on VMware, but they don't want them to stay running in their data centers,” said Garman.
For other workloads, the company has a Q-based solution.
“We know VMware is deeply, intensely entrenched in your data centers … and because it's been there for a long time, there's this kind of spaghetti mess of interconnected applications,” Garman said.
Garman suggested an agent-driven alternative. “Q is able to help you easily modernize workloads that are running on VMware and move them to a cloud-native solution,” he said.
