Amazon Q – Your new fledgling SRE

It’s true ! 🙂 AWS have begun extending Amazon Q’s capabilities 🙂 Where will it go in the future has exciting possibilities 🙂 At present this is per account, but imagine when it becomes Org wide!

When you log into your AWS accounts and select Q on the right hand side you may see this now:

Clicking on Learn More for adding in cross-region preferences takes you here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/chat-actions.html

To summarize this for you:

Amazon Q allows users to interact with and retrieve information about their AWS resources through the AWS Management Console chat panel. This feature is currently in preview and may change.

Capabilities

Actions: Amazon Q can perform get, list, and describe actions.
Queries: Users can ask questions like “List my S3 buckets” or “Show my running EC2 instances in us-east-1”.
Limitations: Amazon Q cannot access data stored within resources or handle questions related to security, identity, credentials, or cryptography.

Responses

Results: Amazon Q lists up to 6 resources with details, ARNs, and links to the service console.
Format: When querying a single resource, the response includes information in JSON format.

Prerequisites

Permissions: Specific permissions are required to chat with Amazon Q and to view the resources (e.g., q:SendMessage, q:StartConversation, s3:ListAllMyBuckets).
Example Policy: An example IAM policy is available to grant the necessary permissions.

Important Notes

Fees: Standard AWS fees apply for read, list, or describe actions.
Cross-Region Consent: Amazon Q calls from US East (N. Virginia) and may need consent to access resources in other regions.

Using Amazon Q

Region Specification: Users can specify the Region; otherwise, Amazon Q uses the current or most recent console Region, defaulting to US East (N. Virginia) if none is specified.
Additional Information: Amazon Q may ask for further details, such as resource names or ARNs, to complete requests.

Example Questions

Describe the encryption settings for S3 bucket <name>
List my EC2 instances in us-west-2
Get the configuration for my lambda function <name>

Very cool! 🙂 Can’t wait to see how this can be integrated into chat ops and systems such as Teams, Slack and Discord 🙂