AWS Mainframe Modernization Service Now Generally Available

MMS Founder
MMS Steef-Jan Wiggers

Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Recently, AWS announced the general availability of their mainframe modernization service, allowing customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. In addition, the service includes tools and resources to help customers plan and implement migration and modernization.

AWS Mainframe Modernization service was released in preview at the end of last year. It supports two main migration patterns for mainframe applications: replatforming and refactoring. With replatforming, customers can preserve the application assets and programming language with minimal changes while moving their app to modern infrastructure. The process of replatforming consists of the following steps:

  • Leveraging the Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer from the AWS Mainframe Modernization service to analyze the complexity of existing applications
  • Using Amazon’s Micro Focus Enterprise Developer to create a modern development environment and test changes with the Enterprise Analyzer
  • Using Amazon’s Micro Focus Enterprise Server that provides a scalable deployment environment for rehosting mainframe applications on Linux, Windows, Unix on virtual, Docker containers, or hybrid clouds environments
  • And lastly, using the AWS Mainframe Modernization service to implement more incremental changes once their mainframe applications have been replatformed

With refactoring, customers can have their mainframe application assets automatically converted into a modern language and ecosystem. Under the hood, the AWS Mainframe Modernization uses Blu Age tools, which can refactor legacy applications in COBOL, PL/1, NATURAL, RPG/400, COBOL/400, and their respective underlying databases and data files and transform them into modern applications relying on Angular, Java/Spring, PostgreSQL or other databases.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/modernize-your-mainframe-applications-deploy-them-in-the-cloud/

William Platt, general manager of migration services at AWS, said in a press release:

With AWS Mainframe Modernization, customers and systems integrators can now more quickly and easily refactor or replatform mainframe applications to run in the cloud. AWS Mainframe Modernization provides the necessary tools for organizations to take full advantage of the elasticity, scalability, and reliability of AWS, while also saving time and money.

In addition, Sébastien Stormacq, a principal developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, stated in the News blog post on the GA of AWS Mainframe Modernization service:

Many of our customers running mainframes told us they want to modernize their mainframe-based applications to take advantage of the AWS cloud. They want to increase their agility and their capacity to innovate, gain access to a growing pool of talents with experience running workloads on AWS, and benefit from the continual AWS trend of improving cost/performance ratio.

Currently, the AWS Mainframe Modernization service is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and South America (São Paulo). Furthermore, committed plans are available for pricing discounts, and further pricing details are available on the pricing page.

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