Accelerate Legacy App Modernization with Virtusa and AWS Generative AI

By Néstor Gándara, Global Principal Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Balaji Mohan, Senior Principal Architect – Virtusa
By Hussain Shabbir, Global Head of AWS Practice and Senior Principal Architect – Virtusa

Virtusa

In the past century, software applications have revolutionized businesses across industries, enhancing efficiency, scalability, and customer experience. These applications facilitated automation, data analysis, and streamlined processes, leading to significant cost savings and competitive advantages.

However, over time, many of these applications have become legacy systems, facing challenges such as outdated architectures, limited scalability, and compatibility issues. The rapid pace of technological advancement and changing market demands have rendered many legacy applications obsolete, posing a significant challenge for enterprises.

The Challenge of Legacy Systems

The shortage of skilled professionals proficient in outdated technologies further complicates the modernization process. Businesses struggle to find resources with the necessary expertise to update or migrate legacy systems. Moreover, the pressure to introduce new features and services to remain competitive exacerbates the urgency for modernization, as legacy applications often lack the flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs.

Updating or migrating legacy systems is inherently complex and time-consuming. It requires careful planning, testing, and implementation to ensure minimal disruption to business operations. Additionally, the financial implications of modernization, including the cost of hiring skilled professionals, acquiring new technologies, and potential downtime, can strain the budgets of many organizations, especially smaller businesses with limited resources.

The Role of Generative AI in Modernization

At Virtusa, the company witnesses this scenario playing out across their customer organizations, irrespective of their domain. This ranges from migrating mainframe applications to a modern language like Java, to migrating legacy Java applications to modern architectures that suit their business needs.

Generative AI presents a transformative solution to the challenges of modernizing legacy applications, offering powerful tools for automating and accelerating the modernization process. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques, Generative AI can analyze legacy codebases, document the business logic, and even convert them into the target language.

Virtusa Corporation is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and global provider of digital business strategy, engineering, and IT services and solutions. Virtusa’s generative AI capabilities are branded as Virtusa Helio, which exemplifies our commitment to harnessing advanced AI technologies for business transformation.

Using Helio for Upgrading Java Applications

Virtusa’s Helio, powered by Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation, automatically analyzes existing code, generates a transformation plan, and completes the transformation tasks suggested by the plan. It identifies and updates package dependencies and refactors deprecated and inefficient code components, switching to new language frameworks and incorporating security best practices. Once complete, the transformed code can be reviewed, complete with build and test results, before accepting the changes.

Once the Java version is upgraded, Helio CodeAnalyzer, a Generative AI powered tool, will analyze the code and generate documentation artifacts like class diagrams, sequence diagrams, Swagger API documentation, and English explanation for the code files. This helps in better maintenance and management of the application. Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation supports upgrading to Java 17 from Java 8, or Java 11 applications built with Maven.

Using Generative AI for Mainframe Application Migration

One of the prominent requests we are witnessing from our banking customers is to migrate mainframe applications to Java. The current process is quite slow, where reverse engineering a COBOL file typically takes upwards of 20 days. The shortage of mainframe skills exacerbates this issue.

Virtusa’s solution leverages Helio CodeAnalyzer to first understand the COBOL codebase to generate English documentation for different personas such as Business Analysts, System Architects, or Developers. It also provides feasibility of migration along with a migration plan depending on the nature of the application. This serves a couple of purposes: one, validate the relevancy of the business rules and two, add or update the logic as required before migrating them to the target language.

A Large Language Model (LLM), made available through Amazon Bedrock, is used to parse the COBOL code and break it down into manageable sections. This step involves extracting information about variables, functions, and control structures from the code.

The revised business rules and code modules are then used to generate REST services or microservices in another language such as Java Spring Boot framework. This is accomplished with the help of Helio FAST, a Low Code No Code (LCNC) platform powered by generative AI. It can take a service structure as configuration input and generate Java Spring Boot code accordingly. Any business logic can then be added using the code suggestion capability built within the FAST framework.

The Benefits of Helio-Powered Modernization

The integration of Helio in the modernization process offers numerous benefits. It ensures that the modernization is performed accurately and efficiently, reducing the risk of introducing new bugs or inconsistencies. Additionally, it allows businesses to focus on innovation rather than getting bogged down by technical debt and legacy issues.

For instance, the use of Helio in upgrading Java applications and migrating mainframe applications to Java has shown significant improvements in speed and accuracy. Tools like Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation and fully managed services such as Amazon Bedrock that offers a choice of foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies, enable seamless transitions and provide documentation that ensures every aspect of the legacy code is preserved and optimized.

Case Study Success Stories with Virtusa and AWS

Several Virtusa clients have already reaped the benefits of integrating Helio in their modernization efforts.

One of the leading global providers of business decision data and analytics was embarking on a migration of 3 large systems. The scope was to migrate 1500+ CI/CD pipelines from Jenkins to Harness. Considering the volume of the pipelines, it was imperative to explore an automation possibility to increase productivity and speed to market.

Virtusa was able to perform this migration in record time using Helio FAST This resulted in an effort savings of 60% converting XML configurations and Groovy scripts of Jenkins to Harness YAML files. Use of AI/NLP/Generative AI allowed smooth delivery and brought predictability to the entire migration process.

Conclusion

The modernization of legacy applications is imperative for businesses seeking to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. However, this process is fraught with challenges, including the shortage of expertise, time constraints, and budget limitations. Helio, Virtusa’s AWS generative AI solution, offers a promising approach to these challenges, enabling enterprises to automate and accelerate the modernization process while minimizing risks and maximizing efficiency. By leveraging the power of Helio, businesses can unlock new opportunities for innovation and growth, driving business transformation in the digital age.

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Virtusa – AWS Partner Spotlight

Virtusa is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and global provider of digital business strategy, engineering, and IT services and solutions. Virtusa accelerates clients’ cloud adoption through technical, training, and GTM investments.

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