Category: Mainframe & Legacy

A multi-company team led by ARRAY delivered for the U.S. Air Force a successful modernization of a COBOL-based system running on aged mainframes to a Java-based system running on x86 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). AWS provides the system’s capabilities for reliability, scalability, and this post describes the objectives, approach, solution, lessons, and customer benefits realized from this experience.

The Modernization Platform-as-a-Service (ModPaaS) from APN Partner Modern Systems allows customers to collaborate in a highly-customizable manner. ModPaaS is available on AWS Marketplace and gives you access to Modern Systems-developed modernization solutions “as a service” on AWS. It can be used in a self-service manner, with assistance from Modern Systems’ modernization specialists, or in a fully-managed approach similar to traditional project engagements.

Mainframe monoliths have grown over the years with overwhelming complexity. They often mix different languages and data stores with various interfaces, evolving coding standards, online and batch, and millions of lines of code. With AWS, customers use microservices for agility, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go cloud technology. In this post, we explore AWS Blu Age solutions to peel off AWS microservices from a mainframe monolith, and how to solve data challenges associated with such a migration.

There is no one-size-fits-all for mainframe modernization to AWS. Depending on the business and IT strategy, customers select the most suitable pattern for them. If the mainframe is large enough to process multiple workloads, the characteristics can favor different patterns. Fortunately, based on our experience from successful customer modernization projects to AWS, we have identified patterns, lessons learned, and best practices that facilitate new mainframe-to-AWS initiatives.

Heirloom automatically refactors mainframe applications’ code, data, job control definitions, user interfaces, and security rules to a cloud-native platform on AWS. Using an industry-standard TPC-C benchmark, we demonstrated the elasticity of Heirloom on AWS, delivering 1,018 transactions per second—equivalent to the processing capacity of a large mainframe. Heirloom Computing is an APN Standard Technology Partner.

NTT DATA Services provides a mainframe re-host solution that minimizes application code change while benefiting from the agility AWS offers. NTT DATA’s re-hosting reference architecture, migration best practices, and extensive technology feature set streamline mainframe migrations to AWS. NTT DATA is an APN Advanced Consulting Partner that helps clients navigate and simplify the modern complexities of business and technology, delivering the insights, solutions, and outcomes that matter most to their objectives.

Migrating a mainframe is a complex project, and Candid Partners is focused on solving the toughest business problems using AWS. They have successfully completed a legacy mainframe to AWS migration for a global enterprise client and are actively working on similar initiatives. In this post, Candid shares their experience and describes the approach, architecture, and lessons learned from this real-life mainframe migration. Candid Partners is an APN Advanced Consulting Partner with the AWS Migration Competency.

When carefully planned, managed, and executed, the rewards of moving Mainframe workloads to AWS are numerous. Besides the cost savings of the pay-as-you-go model, once your Mainframe application set has been fully deployed on AWS, you will have the freedom to integrate proven business logic with modern technologies for data analytics or mobile enablement. With that in mind, migrating Mainframe applications to the cloud seems more like a necessity than a luxury.

While modernizing customer mainframes, the team at AWS Blu Age discovered that Batch can be a complex aspect of a mainframe migration to AWS. It’s critical to design your AWS architecture to account for the key Batch stringent performance requirements such as intensive I/Os, large datasets, and short durations. Let’s explore how to migrate mainframe Batch to AWS microservices using AWS Blu Age automated transformation technology.