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Amazon Q Developer AI Updates Include Cost Optimization
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced new cost optimization features for Amazon Q Developer, its AI-powered assistant for cloud builders. The update delivers personalized recommendations to help customers reduce AWS spending and streamline their cost management workflows.
Cost optimization is just one of several recent enhancements to Amazon Q Developer. AWS has also introduced expanded agentic capabilities for Q chat, enabling the assistant to handle complex, multi-step queries and provide deeper resource analysis directly within the AWS Management Console and in chat applications like Microsoft Teams and Slack. These updates allow users to perform advanced troubleshooting, map relationships across AWS resources, and receive comprehensive insights -- all through natural language prompts.
Amazon Q Developer Adds Personalized Cost Optimization
Amazon Q Developer now provides users with tailored cost optimization recommendations through natural language conversations in the AWS Management Console. Customers can ask questions such as "How can I lower my AWS bill?" and receive prioritized suggestions based on potential savings, implementation effort, and performance risk.
The assistant combines insights from the AWS Cost Optimization Hub with expert guidance, enabling users to identify and act on opportunities such as:
- Rightsizing instances
- Purchasing Savings Plans or Reserved Instances
- Terminating idle resources
Customers can also request detailed explanations for each recommendation, including relevant metrics and configuration details. For example, users may ask, "How was this recommendation calculated?" or "How was this instance identified as idle?" and receive narrative explanations with metrics, configurations, and customization options.
According to AWS, this new capability helps customers find and implement opportunities for rightsizing instances, purchasing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, terminating idle resources, and more -- all through natural language conversations.
These features are available in the US East (N. Virginia) region and cover all commercial AWS regions except China and AWS GovCloud (US). Users can access the new capabilities by opening the Amazon Q chat panel in the AWS Management Console and asking about ways to optimize their costs.
Expanded Agentic Capabilities in Console and Chat
Alongside cost optimization, AWS has expanded Amazon Q Developer's "agentic" capabilities in the AWS Management Console and chat applications such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. The assistant can now answer more complex queries, perform deeper resource introspection, and offer dynamic troubleshooting.
Amazon Q Developer can break down user prompts into multiple steps, consult over 200 AWS service APIs, and synthesize data from various sources to provide comprehensive answers. For example, users can request:
- "Show me all my SNS topics and their subscribers."
- "List the AMIs used by my running EC2 instances in us-west-2 that can communicate with my RDS cluster."
[Click on image for larger view.] List all the AMIs ... (source: AWS).
The assistant automatically determines the necessary analytical steps and presents unified results.
As AWS describes, Amazon Q breaks all queries into executable steps, asks for clarification when needed, and combines information from multiple services to solve the task.
Improved Troubleshooting and Resource Analysis
The latest updates also enhance operational troubleshooting. When users encounter issues such as Lambda functions returning 500 errors, Amazon Q Developer can:
- Gather relevant CloudWatch logs
- Examine function configurations and permissions
- Check connected services (such as API Gateway, DynamoDB, and RDS)
- Analyze recent changes to identify root causes
The assistant then provides actionable remediation steps, streamlining the troubleshooting process. AWS notes, Q automatically gathers relevant CloudWatch logs, examines function's configuration and permissions, checks connected services like API Gateway and DynamoDB and analyzes recent changes -- all while showing progress and reasoning to enable builders to work more efficiently.
Amazon Q Developer's new capabilities are available in all AWS regions where the service is offered. Builders and IT professionals can now leverage the assistant for complex analysis, resource mapping, cost correlation, and faster issue resolution -- all through natural language interactions in the AWS Console and supported chat applications.
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About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.