At Amazon’s AWS re: Invent conference this morning, the company announced a new mainframe migration and modernization platform, simply called “AWS Mainframe Modernization,” designed to help AWS customers get “ASAP” from Your mainframes Make better use of the cloud.
Today, customers can take a number of routes to get out of their mainframes – either they take a “lift-and-shift” approach and bring their application as good as it is, or they can redesign the application and split it up as microservices in the cloud. But neither is that easy, and the process can take months or even years as customers evaluate the complexity of the application’s source code, understand the dependencies on other systems, convert or recompile the code, and then everything has to be tested to make sure everything works.
“It can be a messy business and it can have a lot of moving parts. And it’s not something that people really want to do on their own, ”said Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, at the press event. “While AWS partners can help with the transition, it can still take a long time,” he added.
Instead, the new AWS Mainframe Modernization solution makes it faster to migrate, modernize, and run mainframe applications on AWS. The company claims that with its development, test, and deployment tools and a mainframe-compatible runtime environment, it can cut the time it takes to move mainframe workloads to the cloud by up to two-thirds. The solution also helps customers evaluate and analyze their mainframe applications for operational readiness, then help them choose the path they want – re-platforming or refactoring – and then draw up a plan.
If the customer wants to convert the platform, the mainframe modernization solution offers compilers to convert code and test services to ensure that functionality is not lost during translation. If the customer wants to redesign or disassemble the application – if the components could be executed in EC2, in containers or in Lambda, for example – they can use the mainframe modernization solution to automatically convert the COBOL code to Java. With a migration hub, customers can track their migration progress across multiple AWS partners and solutions from a single location.
Amazon advertises the system as an agile and cost-efficient (with demand-dependent, usage-dependent resources) managed service that offers security and high availability, scalability and elasticity.
