Boosting team innovation, productivity, and knowledge sharing with Amazon Q Business – Web experience

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Amazon AWS

Amazon Q Business can increase productivity across diverse teams, including developers, architects, site reliability engineers (SREs), and product managers. Amazon Q Business as a web experience makes AWS best practices readily accessible, providing cloud-centered recommendations quickly and making it straightforward to access AWS service functions, limits, and implementations. These elements are brought together in a web integration that serves various job roles and personas exactly when they need it.

As enterprises continue to grow their applications, environments, and infrastructure, it has become difficult to keep pace with technology trends, best practices, and programming standards. Enterprises provide their developers, engineers, and architects with a range of knowledge bases and documents, such as usage guides, wikis, and tools. But these resources tend to become siloed over time and inaccessible across teams, resulting in reduced knowledge, duplication of work, and reduced productivity.

MuleSoft from Salesforce provides the Anypoint platform that gives IT the tools to automate everything. This includes integrating data and systems and automating workflows and processes, and the creation of incredible digital experiences—all on a single, user-friendly platform.

This post shows how MuleSoft introduced a generative AI-powered assistant using Amazon Q Business to enhance their internal Cloud Central dashboard. This individualized portal shows assets owned, costs and usage, and well-architected recommendations to over 100 engineers. For more on MuleSoft’s journey to cloud computing, refer to Why a Cloud Operating Model?

Developers, engineers, FinOps, and architects can get the right answer at the right time when they’re ready to troubleshoot, address an issue, have an inquiry, or want to understand AWS best practices and cloud-centered deployments.

This post covers how to integrate Amazon Q Business into your enterprise setup.

Solution overview

The Amazon Q Business web experience provides seamless access to information, step-by-step instructions, troubleshooting, and prescriptive guidance so teams can deploy well-architected applications or cloud-centered infrastructure. Team members can chat directly or upload documents and receive summarization, analysis, or answers to a calculation. Amazon Q Business uses supported connectors such as Confluence, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and web crawlers. The following diagram shows the reference architecture for various personas, including developers, support engineers, DevOps, and FinOps to connect with internal databases and the web using Amazon Q Business.

Reference Architecture

In this reference architecture, you can see how various user personas, spanning across teams and business units, use the Amazon Q Business web experience as an access point for information, step-by-step instructions, troubleshooting, or prescriptive guidance for deploying a well-architected application or cloud-centered infrastructure. The web experience allows team members to chat directly with an AI assistant or upload documents and receive summarization, analysis, or answers to a calculation.

Use cases for Amazon Q Business

Small, medium, and large enterprises, depending on their mode of operation, type of business, and level of investment in IT, will have varying approaches and policies on providing access to information. Amazon Q Business is one of the AWS suites of generative AI services that provides a web-based utility to set up, manage, and interact with Amazon Q. It can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks using the data and expertise found in your enterprise systems. You can connect internal and external datasets without compromising security to seamlessly incorporate your specific standard operating procedures, guidelines, playbooks, and reference links. With Amazon Q, MuleSoft’s engineering teams were able to address their AWS specific inquiries (such as support ticket escalation, operational guidance, and AWS Well-Architected best practices) at scale.

The Amazon Q Business web experience allows business users across various job titles and functions to interact with Amazon Q through the web browser. With the web experience, teams can access the same information and receive similar recommendations based on their prompt or inquiry, level of experience, and knowledge, ranging from beginner to advanced.

The following demos are examples of what the Amazon Q Business web experience looks like. Amazon Q Business securely connects to over 40 commonly used business tools, such as wikis, intranets, Atlassian, Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Point Amazon Q Business at your enterprise data, and it will search your data, summarize it logically, analyze trends, and engage in dialogue with end users about the data. This helps users access their data no matter where it resides in their organization.

Amazon Q Business underscores prompting and response for prescriptive guidance. Optimizing Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes as an example, it provided detailed migration steps from gp2 to gp3. This is a well-known use case asked about by several MuleSoft teams.

Through the web experience, you can effortlessly perform document uploads and prompts for summary, calculation, or recommendations based on your document. You have the flexibility to upload .pdf, .xls, .xlsx, or .csv files directly into the chat interface. You can also assume a persona such as FinOps or DevOps and get personalized recommendations or responses.

MuleSoft engineers used the Amazon Q Business web summarization feature to better understand Split Cost Allocation Data (SCAD) for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). They uploaded the SCAD PDF documents to Amazon Q and got straightforward summaries. This helped them understand their customer’s use of MuleSoft Anypoint platform running on Amazon EKS.

Amazon Q helped analyze IPv4 costs by processing an uploaded Excel file. As the video shows, it calculated expenses for elastic IPs and outbound data transfers, supporting a proposed network estimate.

Amazon Q Business demonstrating its ability to provide tailored advice by responding to a specific user scenario. As the video shows, a user took on the role of a FinOps professional and asked Amazon Q to recommend AWS tools for cost optimization. Amazon Q then offered personalized suggestions based on this FinOps persona perspective.

Prerequisites

To get started with your Amazon Q Business web experience, you need the following prerequisites:

Create an Amazon Q Business web experience

Complete the following steps to create your web experience:

The web experience can be used by a variety of business users or personas to yield accurate and repeatable recommendations for level 100, 200, and 300 inquiries. Amazon Q supports a variety of data sources and data connectors to personalize your user experience. You can also further enrich your dataset with knowledge bases within Amazon Q. With Amazon Q Business set up with your own datasets and sources, teams and business units within your enterprise can index from the same information on common topics such as cost optimization, modernization, and operational excellence while maintaining their own unique area of expertise, responsibility, and job function.

Clean Up

After trying the Amazon Q Business web experience, remember to remove any resources you created to avoid unnecessary charges. Complete the following steps:

  1. Delete the web experience:
    • On the Amazon Q Business console, navigate to the Web experiences section within your application.
    • Select the web experience you want to remove.
    • On the Actions menu, choose Delete.
    • Confirm the deletion by following the prompts.
  2. If you granted specific users access to the web experience, revoke their permissions. This might involve updating AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies or removing users from specific groups in IAM Identity Center.
  3. If you set up any custom configurations for the web experience, such as specific data source filters or custom prompts, make sure to remove these.
  4. If you integrated the web experience with other tools or services, remove those integrations.
  5. Check for and delete any Amazon CloudWatch alarms or logs specifically set up for monitoring this web experience.

After deletion, review your AWS billing to make sure that charges related to the web experience have stopped.

Deleting a web experience is irreversible. Make sure you have any necessary backups or exports of important data before proceeding with the deletion. Also, keep in mind that deleting a web experience doesn’t automatically delete the entire Amazon Q Business application or its associated data sources. If you want to remove everything, follow the Amazon Q Business application clean-up procedure for the entire application.

Conclusion

Amazon Q Business web experience is your gateway to a powerful generative AI assistant. Want to take it further? Integrate Amazon Q with Slack for an even more interactive experience.

Every organization has unique needs when it comes to AI. That’s where Amazon Q shines. It adapts to your business needs, user applications, and end-user personas. The best part? You don’t need to do the heavy lifting. No complex infrastructure setup. No need for teams of data scientists. Amazon Q connects to your data and makes sense of it with just a click. It’s AI power made simple, giving you the intelligence you need without the hassle.

To learn more about the power of a generative AI assistant in your workplace, see Amazon Q Business.

About the Authors

Rueben Jimenez is an AWS Sr Solutions Architect who designs and implements complex data analytics, machine learning, generative AI, and cloud infrastructure solutions.

Sona Rajamani is a Sr. Manager Solutions Architect at AWS.  She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and helps customers architect and optimize applications on AWS. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and hiking.

Erick Joaquin is a Sr Customer Solutions Manager for Strategic Accounts at AWS. As a member of the account team, he is focused on evolving his customers’ maturity in the cloud to achieve operational efficiency at scale.

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