• AWS Q Developer helps teams migrate from Windows to Linux.
• “An easy button” to escape Microsoft licences.
• Updates and refactors .NET apps for cross-platform compatibility.

Five years ago, the AWS Cloud CEO Andy Jassy addressed the AWS re:Invent conference. He talked about the sense of injustice he felt that changes to Microsoft’s licensing meant that applications running on new versions of Windows wouldn’t run on dedicated server instances in cloud providers other than Azure.

“[Microsoft] are not prioritising what matters to you guys, the customers,” he said. Of course, what Jassy meant was that Microsoft was not pursuing policies that would benefit AWS’s revenues, which was indubitably a tragedy for him. At the time, Jassy claimed that 97% of the trillion-dollar IT market remained on-premise, and that it would be better for everyone concerned if a big chunk of IT spending went cloudwards, presumably to AWS.

At the more recent 2024 re:Invent, the company’s latest Cloud CEO, Matt Garman, announced a new feature of AWS’s platform Q Developer that aims to help organisations move their (Microsoft) .NET applications to Linux, thus removing the imposition of companies paying fees to Microsoft for Windows licences, and giving them the wherewithal to host applications on freedom-loving AWS.

The Q Developer User Guide states, “Amazon Q Developer can port your Windows-based .NET applications to Linux-compatible cross-platform .NET applications through a generative AI-powered refactoring workflow. Amazon Q [Developer] also helps you upgrade outdated versions of cross-platform .NET applications to newer versions.”

Although developers shouldn’t expect a magic wand that will make their .NET applications migrate from Windows to Linux, the Q Developer platform will refactor and update C# code so it will run on Linux, replace dependencies, and report any issues that require manual work.

New versions of migrating applications are safely stashed away until they are allowed into production, and the platform will also help run unit tests against the new code to see how it performs. Applications are also rebuilt so they’re reproducible on any Linux foundation, so theoretically, teams could pick up refactored code and shift it to a wholly-different cloud provider if desired.

AWS Q Developer’s AI capabilities are touted as the biggest competitor to Microsoft’s Copilot, which uses an AI originally trained on the massive code repositorien on GitHub, a site that Redmond acquired in 2018 for $7.5bn. Q was trained on what Amazon stated at the time was “17 years of AWS development,” and offers developers a suite of applications on which apps can be built with some machine learning help, tested, extended and hosted on AWS infrastructure.

Many Linux natives will be aware of Mono, a re-implementation of some of Microsoft’s .NET framework that uses C# as its programming language. Due to its provenance, Mono gained little traction in the open-source development world, but remains in fairly common use as a cross-platform development platform alongside .NET, suitable for writing mobile, Mac, and Windows applications. The original .NET was largely open-sourced by Microsoft in 2014, and last year, Microsoft handed its own fork of Mono to the Wine Project where it remains largely unmaintained by unimpressed geeks.

The point here is that Q Developer’s migration tool is like many AWS ‘native’ tools, in that it’s based largely on iterations of technology developed by communities outside the confines of the Amazon campus, yet is charged-for via subscription, and the platform is focused on keeping anything produced by Q Developer inside the AWS stable. It’s possible to migrate from Windows to Linux using this latest feature, but there are potential downsides.

In his keynote at re:Invent this year, Matt Garman said, “Customers would love an easy button to get off of Windows. They’re tired of constant security issues, the constant packing or patching, [and] all the scalability challenges that they have to deal with. And they definitely hate the onerous licensing costs.”

Migration of .NET applications off the Windows platform has been physically possible for several years, and in a way that’s been relatively legally watertight for only a slightly shorter time. But Q Developer makes the platform shift faster and partly automated, although the presence of AI in the mix means that human verification of what’s produced will definitely be wise. What organisations running .NET currently need to be mindful of is that they don’t exchange one set of financial liabilities for another – instead of paying Microsoft for licences, they end up paying (hopefully less) money to AWS or, theoretically, any other cloud provider.