AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog
Introducing the quick start experience for HAQM Q Developer Pro
For software developers, development teams and IT Professionals, the HAQM Q Developer Pro Tier is recommended. The pro tier offers higher limits, enterprise administration, an analytics dashboard, code customizations and IP indemnity. In addition, the HAQM Q Developer Pro Tier requires AWS IAM Identity Center. For most production deployments, an organization instances of IAM Identity Center is recommended. An organization instance supports identity aware sessions which are required to use the Pro tier in the AWS Console, in addition to the benefits outline in the IAM identity Center user guide.
However, what if your team would like to get started quickly to try out HAQM Q Developer Pro Tier on the IDE but there are constraints that are slowing you down such as:
- You don’t have plans to adopt IAM Identity Center across your organization.
- You have an organization instance of IAM Identity Center, but you want to deploy HAQM Q Developer Pro to an isolated set of users that are distinct from users in your organization instance.
- You don’t control the AWS Organization in which you operate. For example, a third-party controls the AWS organization that manages your AWS accounts and it takes time to get changes approved.
To address these scenarios, we recently announced a new, simplified setup experience with two steps that makes it easier for teams that are looking to try out the features of HAQM Q Developer Pro in their Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Management Account and AWS IAM Identity Center
Before we jump into a tour of the quick start setup, let’s take a step back and consider the AWS recommendation of using a multi-account setup to organize your workloads. The benefits can be seen in our AWS white paper on organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts and the recommended approach is to implement this with AWS Organizations. A management account is the AWS account you use to create your organization and this should be kept minimal and secure and only host essential administrative tools such as setting up AWS Organizations and implementing single sign on via IAM Identity Center.
IAM Identity Center is core to the HAQM Q Developer Pro setup. IAM Identity Center users can access AWS accounts and applications using their existing organizational credentials, without the need to create and manage separate AWS accounts and passwords.
For example, IAM Identity Center can connect and automatically provision users from standards-based identity providers including Microsoft Active Directory, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace or another supported identity provider (IdP) via Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 or OIDC.
Figure 1. Manage Access to HAQM Q Developer via AWS IAM Identity Center.
This is a great experience for developers as they simply authorize their Q Developer session with their usual sign in process via the Identity source already in place in their business. Administrators benefit from features such as centralized access management, streamlined permissions management and enhanced administrator capabilities to view HAQM Q user activity.
HAQM Q Developer Pro Simplified Setup Experience
The above approach of setting up IAM Identity Center in a management account is ideal but not always viable, so we have created a new getting started experience makes it easier for teams that are looking to try out the features of HAQM Q Developer Pro in their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) starting with:
- A standalone account that is not part of an organization managed by AWS Organizations.
- A member account, other than the management account, that is part of an AWS Organization but doesn’t have organization level users managed in IAM Identity Center.
For both standalone and member accounts there is a two step process. The first step for setting up HAQM Q Developer Pro starts by navigating to the HAQM Q console and selecting Get started:
Figure 2. HAQM Q Console – Getting started with HAQM Q.
The setup will guide through creating the first user and activating a subscribing to HAQM Q Developer Pro in your account, this initial step also includes creating an account instance of IAM Identity Center and an AWS managed application instance of HAQM Q Developer. A detailed walkthrough is available in our documentation – Subscribing users to HAQM Q Developer Pro.
When complete, the first user can be seen within the HAQM Q Subscriptions:
Figure 3. HAQM Q Subscriptions.
The second step is to subscribe the additional team members to the account instance of IAM Identity Center and then subscribing them to HAQM Q Developer Pro via the HAQM Q console.
Figure 4. IAM Identity Center Users.
Once a user has been successfully subscribed, they will receive an email with instructions on how to activate their HAQM Q Developer Pro Subscription and start using the features.
Note that account instances of IAM Identity Center have limitations. For example, account instances don’t support console access. (Users can still use HAQM Q in the console, it’s just that they’ll be subject to the Free tier monthly limits.) If you want to use HAQM Q Developer Pro in the console and other AWS websites, you must be a user in an organization instance of IAM Identity Center, in a management account.
At this point, it should be noted, that IAM Identity Center can now be configured to change it’s identity source to a Federated Identity Provider (IdP), see our documentation pages on how to change your identity source.
Cleanup
To cleanup the resource created in this blog, first remove HAQM Q Developer Pro users by following our guide:
Secondly, delete the IAM Identity Center instance:
Conclusion
Getting started with HAQM Q Developer Pro is now even easier with the new, simplified setup experience, you can experience the pro features in your IDE such as higher limits on advanced features such as:
- Chat, debug code, add tests and more in your integrated developer environment (IDE).
- Accelerate tasks with the HAQM Q Developer agents for software development.
- Upgrade apps in a fraction of the time with the HAQM Q Developer Agent for code transformation.
Get on-board with the HAQM Q Developer User Guide on Subscribing users to HAQM Q Developer Pro.
Read more about how the community are using HAQM Q to write code and build applications faster and easier with HAQM Q on community.aws and explore what we are building with HAQM Q Developer here.
Note that while this post focuses on HAQM Q Developer Pro, developers can get started at no cost and without an AWS account; HAQM Q Developer offers a perpetual Free Tier with monthly limits available to users, see our user guide for HAQM Q Developer Free tier.