AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
AI-led Application Modernization with Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform
By Mandar Shete – Senior Principal, Modernization Practice, Infosys
By Prabhat Kumar – Senior Principal, Modernization Practice, Infosys
By Dhiraj Thakur, Solutions Architect, AWS
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| Infosys |
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In an era where digital transformation is no longer optional but a necessity, regular modernization of technology stacks is crucial for staying ahead. This drive is fueled by the need to increase agility and resilience, improve user experience, foster innovation, and address technology debt. Enterprises can use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to tap into a robust cloud infrastructure that offers scalability, flexibility, and advanced capabilities.
However, embarking on a large-scale modernization program presents several challenges. These include navigating complex technology stacks, addressing a shortage of skilled professionals, overcoming a lack of standardization, and managing the daunting task of upfront setup and long timelines. Additionally, the rapid pace of technological advancements makes it difficult to keep systems up-to-date.
Adopting an AI-first, platform-based approach can mitigate these risks, reduce time-to-market and provide a competitive edge. The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform is integral to this approach, making the process faster, simpler and more efficient while aligning with organization and industry standards. The platform integrates seamlessly with existing systems, reducing the risk of disruptions during the transition.
This blog post provides insights on the Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform and how it offers a comprehensive solution for enterprises navigating their modernization journey.
Enterprises are at different stages of their modernization journeys, with unique goals and challenges
Some enterprises seek solutions to refresh outdated technology stacks and transition to a more agile architecture, some aim to migrate from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, while others need to build brand-new capabilities from scratch.
In partnership with AWS, Infosys addresses modernization challenges head-on by offering a range of capabilities designed to streamline the journey. The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform is at the heart of this effort, providing comprehensive solutions at every stage of the modernization lifecycle as well as every layer of the application stack.
Figure 1: Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform reference architecture
Generative AI (Gen AI) has emerged as a game-changer for technology modernization
It enables targeted capabilities to solve previously intractable problems, such as understanding complex legacy code, extracting organizational knowledge from myriad data sources, and generating various types of code with natural language or visual inputs.
AWS has a comprehensive range of services under Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Q to simplify the building and consumption of Gen AI capabilities. These include the ability to host and access various models via API, storing and querying embeddings using vector databases. Orchestrating a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) flows, data preparation, training models with SageMaker and a suite of managed capabilities via Amazon Q.
The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform utilizes AWS Gen AI services to power its workflows across the modernization lifecycle
The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform leverages Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that helps to choose high-performing foundation models (FMs) through a single API. Amazon Bedrock provides an integrated set of tools to help developers design, build, and deploy Gen AI applications with security, privacy and responsible AI. Since it is serverless, it eliminates the need to own or manage any AI infrastructure.
The Infosys platform integrates Gen AI capabilities with other types of automation to offer features from assessment and planning to implementation and optimization. This ensures that enterprises can seamlessly transition their legacy systems into modern, agile environments while adhering to best practices in technology. It supports over a hundred AWS and open-source services that allow enterprises to stand up their application portfolios on the cloud and automate all aspects of creating and maintaining these architectures.
Figure 2: Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform Capabilities
The platform provides 40+ features across five key modernization patterns:
Mainframe Modernization
The challenges are multifaceted for organizations looking to move away from mainframe systems with their high-cost base and rigidity. Legacy codebases are notoriously tricky to work with due to their complexity, lack of documentation, and reliance on obsolete technologies. This makes it hard for modern developers to understand and modernize the system without introducing new bugs or performance issues.
The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform offers robust capabilities that streamline the process of migrating mainframe systems to cloud-native environments. These include extracting business rules from legacy codebases, re-engineering mainframe applications to microservices and rehosting them on cloud.
Figure 3: Business Rule Extraction and Documentation from Mainframe Code using Gen AI
An example of how the platform uses Gen AI for modernization is extracting business rules from legacy systems as part of reverse engineering. The platform uses Foundation Models (FMs) like Claude Sonnet or Amazon Titan Text Premier through Amazon Bedrock to act as an input to the forward engineering phase. This ensures that all critical business logic and workflows are accurately captured, with reduced human intervention and the need for mainframe skills. The platform can also generate high-level use cases and business requirements from a legacy codebase using RAG methods, fine-tuned chunking algorithms, and continuous improvement based on user feedback.
Cloud Native Development
Most enterprises seek to revitalize their legacy systems by transitioning to a cloud native architecture, driven by the need to tap into the agility, flexibility, scalability, and efficiency that cloud and cloud native technologies offer.
These architectures are typically implemented on AWS cloud with modern building blocks such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), among many others.
To support this shift, the Infosys platform automates and accelerates cloud native development with capabilities such as:
- AI-powered generation of technical requirements and design artifacts from business requirements, using Amazon Bedrock
- Contextual non-functional microservices code generation based on inputs such as API and DB schemas
- Full-stack environment provisioning on AWS using AI-powered infrastructure-as-code (IaC)
- Unit, functional, performance, and accessibility testing
- One-click DevSecOps pipeline creation and execution
The platform is complemented by Amazon Q Developer that further accelerates the development processes by enabling the safe utilization of Gen AI for functional code generation, test generation, and code documentation.
Cloud Modernization
Large enterprises can leverage a range of AWS services to create hybrid architectures based on the shape of their application portfolio. The cloud modernization capabilities of the Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform provide a set of building blocks to accelerate this phase, starting with the assessment of cloud architectures and patterns to fit the customer use case. It uses Amazon Bedrock to generate IaC and detailed architecture documentation based on just architecture diagrams, enabling AWS environments to be set up much faster. The solution has a feedback loop with tooling (e.g., linters) for accurate code generation.
Technology and framework migration is automated, including as Java upgrades, application server migrations, and Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes migrations. Gen AI-powered language translators are available for common patterns such as migration from C++ to Java or Java to Go, with automated containerization and deployment via pipelines.
Figure 4: Generating Infrastructure-as-Code from architecture diagrams
Database Modernization
Modernization of on-premise databases to cloud is an integral part of cloud adoption, but it also brings challenges of incompatible schema or code, and risks such as data loss or service disruption. Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform accelerates database discovery and assessment, database code migration (e.g., PL/SQL) across RDBMS platforms, as well as the transformation of data structures from RDBMS to NoSQL formats. It also accelerates documentation and transformation of database code to programming languages such as Java.
Gen AI is used to accelerate database migration and transformation, leveraging Bedrock Models like Anthropic Claude Sonnet.
These features work with AWS services such as AWS Schema Migration Tool (SCT) for schema conversion across database engines and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for fast, reliable and secure data migration to the cloud.
The platform supports key AWS database services including Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora and Amazon DocumentDB ,.
Application ‘Ever-greening’
The modernization journey does not end after the initial transformation is completed. Enterprises must keep their applications ‘evergreen’ by minimizing ongoing technical debt, maintaining software currency, and more. The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform provides a technical debt dashboard that offers an integrated view of all types of technical debt, including security, version, architecture, performance and code, across the entire application portfolio. The platform also provides easy one-click AI-powered auto-remediation for technical debt issues.
Additionally, it accelerates common tasks like framework version upgrades and technology migrations, providing detailed assessment reports and automated code changes. The platform includes AI-based code summarization and rules extraction capabilities, which help developers understand and maintain legacy applications.
The SME Assistant feature of the platform ensure that the SMEs’ expertise is documented and readily accessible. It uses Amazon Bedrock FMs, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, AWS Aurora PostgreSQL and pgvector to create a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow, grounding the assistant in organization knowledge .
The platform, powered by AWS Gen AI services, helps keep application stacks up to date and free of technical debt. It also preserves organizational knowledge, improving their maintainability and readiness for innovation.
Figure 5: Intelligent SME assistant grounded in organizational knowledge
An architecture for Gen AI accelerated Modernization
Below diagram shows how the Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform leverages AWS Gen AI services.
Figure 6: Technical Architecture
The Gen AI capabilities mentioned previously, such as business rules extraction from legacy code, generation of IaC from architecture diagrams, code transformation, SME assistant chatbot and more. These capabilities are powered by various FMs hosted on Amazon Bedrock, as well as higher-level services such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. Advanced prompt engineering and chunking strategies are employed that iteratively improve with customer feedback.
Gen AI also demands a deliberate approach to mitigate the potential risks of using FMs. Responsible AI involves designing Gen AI systems that prioritize transparency, accountability, fairness, and safety from the outset to prevent biases and better protect user privacy. The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform utilizes powerful tools such as Amazon Bedrock Guardrails and Infosys’ Responsible AI framework to create a safe and transparent user experience for all Gen AI-powered features.
Conclusion
Modernizing technology stacks is essential but challenging due to complex systems, skill shortages, and extended timelines. The Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development platform uses automation and Gen AI to simplify and accelerate this process. The platform addresses key modernization challenges by utilizing AWS Gen AI services like Amazon Bedrock, the, ensuring a seamless transition to modern, agile, cloud native environments on AWS. The combination of the Infosys platform and the wide range of services offered by AWS enables organizations to overcome legacy system hurdles, enhance agility, and drive innovation.
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Infosys — AWS Partner Spotlight
Infosys is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that enables clients to outperform competition and stay ahead of the innovation curve.