Migration & Modernization

AWS for mainframe modernization – re:Invent 2025 Refresher

Sessions, workshops, blogposts, and breakthrough announcements

Mainframe modernization is critical imperative for enterprises seeking to reduce costs and improve agility, yet traditional approaches to modernization face significant challenges including navigating complex legacy codebases, incomplete or missing system documentation, and the scarcity of specialized mainframe expertise due to a retiring workforce. Generative AI and Agentic AI are transforming this landscape by automating code analysis, generating comprehensive documentation, and orchestrating intelligent modernization workflows. It accelerates the modernization journey by reducing assessment timelines from several months to days while enabling autonomous systems to make informed decisions, handle exceptions, and iteratively refine transformations improving overall quality.

Whether you are exploring migration strategies, evaluating modernization tools, or seeking implementation guidance, this curated collection will serve as your comprehensive resource for planning and executing mainframe-to-cloud transformations.

Sessions

Executive and broadcast sessions

Start your mainframe modernization journey with strategic insights from AWS leadership and comprehensive overviews of the latest innovations. These executive sessions provide the big-picture vision of how agentic AI is transforming enterprise modernization, while broadcast segments offer accessible deep-dives into specific modernization patterns and capabilities.

AWS re:Invent 2025 – Migrate, modernize, and move your business into the AI era (INV212)
This is a must watch for the organizations aspiring to remove technical debt, accelerate legacy modernization, transform business processes, and reimagine customer experience using Agentic AI. This engaging Innovation Talk from Dr. Asa Kalavade highlights several new agentic AI capabilities launched at re:invent that help customers modernize their IT infrastructure, applications, frameworks, and code at scale. Collectively, these innovations accelerate modernization, reduce tech debt, and enable AI-readiness.

AWS OnAir at re:Invent
Organizations are facing urgent imperatives to modernize their legacy mainframe applications due to talent shortages, increasing costs, and constraints on business agility. This AWS OnAir broadcast segment provides an accessible, comprehensive introduction to AWS’s approach to mainframe modernization, with particular emphasis on the reimagine pattern—one of the most transformative modernization strategies available today. It provides a first look at the reimagine capabilities using AWS Transform artifacts.

Breakout sessions

Dive deep into technical implementations and real-world modernization strategies through these comprehensive breakout sessions. Learn from customer success stories, explore AI-powered transformation approaches, and discover how leading organizations are accelerating their mainframe modernization journeys across different patterns including reimagining, refactoring, replatforming, and data augmentation.

Digital transformation excellence using agentic AI: From vision to victory (MAM204) | Level: 200
Learn how customers, such as Danske Bank, use AWS AI-driven solutions to accelerate cloud transformation beyond traditional migration approaches. This session features real-world cases where organizations integrated AI-powered accelerators with AWS services to achieve 3x faster migration timelines and significant business value. Discover actionable strategies and see how transformation projects can enable future digital enterprise capabilities.

Derisk your mainframe exit with agentic AI-powered refactoring ft BMW & Fiserv (MAM205) | Level: 200
Discover how Fiserv and BMW leveraged AWS Transform’s AI capabilities to modernize mainframe applications. Fiserv built a modernization factory for faster, higher-quality transformations, while BMW migrated critical systems within months. The session highlights AWS Transform’s intelligent refactoring features and practical insights from millions of lines of modernized code.

Reimagine mainframe workloads at speed with agentic AI – ft Itaú & ADP (MAM207) | Level: 200
Join ADP and Itaú leaders sharing their mainframe transformation experiences. Learn their architectural decisions, risk mitigation strategies, and key lessons. Discover how they used AWS Transform’s automated code analysis, documentation, and business rules extraction to improve engineering and testing efficiency while gaining valuable insights for organizations at any modernization stage.

Technical deep dive: Composable AI agents for partner solutions (MAM217) | Level: 200
Learn how agentic AI accelerates enterprise modernization by enabling migration partners to build differentiated solutions combining their tools, industry knowledge, and custom agents with AWS capabilities. Join this technical deep dive to discover how agentic AI differentiates modernization solutions.

Technical deep dive: Customize Your Mainframe Modernization with Composable agentic AI (MAM347) | Level: 200
Master custom mainframe modernization with composable architecture. See how enterprise leaders are accelerating their modernization journeys by integrating specialized partner tools directly into AWS workflows with the power of agentic AI. Transformation leaders from the Western Union and Unum will demonstrate how they built tailored solutions to address their unique modernization challenges, dramatically accelerating timelines while reducing risk. Learn how this composable approach enables customized solutions for even the most complex mainframe environments and discover how to craft your optimized modernization workflow using AWS services integrated with trusted partner solutions.

Customer sessions

Hear directly from our customers and industry leaders who have successfully navigated their mainframe modernization journeys. These sessions showcase real-world implementations, technical architectures, and lessons learned from organizations across banking, payments, telecommunications, and other mission-critical industries.

Maximizing uptime: Itaú’s mission-critical mainframe migration to AWS (IND3304) | Level: 300
Learn how Itaú Bank migrated core banking authorization from mainframe to AWS, achieving 1,000 TPS per account with sub-100ms latency. Serving 70 million clients, Itaú shares DynamoDB optimization strategies, partitioning patterns, and anti-patterns. Discover solutions for concurrent transactions through exclusive threading, cell-based architecture with account sharding, and distributed consistency. Explore techniques for 99.99% uptime while ensuring transaction accuracy and seamless migration validation.

Modernizing Global Payment Processing: Moving from Mainframe to AWS (SPS312) | Level: 300
Global Payments is transforming its 40-year-old mainframe system into a modern, cloud-native platform on AWS. Join this session to explore how enhanced observability and monitoring capabilities help power their secure, always-on payment processing for millions of global customers.

Accelerate Telco Transformation: AT&T’s AI-Powered Migration at Scale (IND201) | Level: 300
Explore how telecommunications companies use AWS generative AI services, including AWS Transform and Amazon Bedrock, to automate legacy system migrations. Learn how CSPs modernize mainframe systems and VMware environments using AI-powered assessment tools, automated infrastructure-as-code generation, and intelligent code transformation. AT&T presents their strategic vision and implementation approach for AI-powered mainframe modernization.

Partner sessions

Discover how AWS partners are enabling successful modernization outcomes across diverse industries. These sessions highlight collaborative approaches, specialized methodologies, and innovative solutions that combine partner expertise with AWS capabilities to deliver transformative results.

Sky’s the limit with crew operations modernization for United Airlines (AIM2200) | Level: 300
United Airlines modernized crew operations for real-time visibility, collaborative communication, and streamlined scheduling essential for IRROPS responses, resource optimization, and on-time departures. Partnering with TCS, United transformed legacy systems on AWS to build UCREW, a crew tracking and monitoring platform. TCS leaders discuss their modernization approach, while Sean Carson, United’s Managing Director, shares how UCREW enhanced operational agility, decision-making, and system reliability. Presented by Tata Consultancy Services, an AWS Partner.

Modernizing Mercedes-Benz’s Global Ordering System with Gen AI (IND218) | Level: 200
Mercedes-Benz is redefining a mainframe based global vehicle ordering system through generative AI-driven modernization with Capgemini and AWS. Discover how their approach—blending replatforming with agentic AI-powered code transformation—strengthens security, boosts agility, and creates a scalable, future-ready IT foundation.

Developer sessions

Explore practical techniques and tools that empower development teams to tackle legacy modernization challenges. This session provides hands-on guidance for transforming monolithic applications into cloud-native architectures using AI-powered automation and modern development practices.

Modernize Legacy Applications with Agentic AI (DEV333) | Level: 200
Legacy monolithic codebases create technical debt and slow innovation. Generative AI tools like Kiro and AWS Transform accelerate modernization through automated dependency analysis, code refactoring, and microservices migration. Learn practical patterns for transforming monoliths into scalable cloud-native services while maintaining business continuity. Discover proven techniques for automated code analysis, strategic refactoring, and systematic migration of macro or microservices.

Workshops

Get hands-on experience with AWS mainframe modernization tools and techniques through these interactive workshops. Each workshop provides practical, step-by-step guidance on key modernization patterns—from reimagining applications with AI agents to refactoring legacy code at scale and modernizing mainframe data architectures.

Reimagine workshop: Mainframe to Microservices: Reimagine with AWS Transform & AI agent
Discover how AWS Transform for mainframe and Kiro generative AI-powered agents rapidly analyze complex COBOL codebases, intelligently extracting and translating embedded business logic to implement Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles when transforming monoliths into microservices. Experience how generative AI-powered discovery automatically identifies optimal microservice boundaries, maps data relationships, and generates comprehensive documentation. The agentic AI approach transforms mainframe modernization by providing recommendations for microservice design patterns while preserving business rules. Learn how to leverage Kiro, an AI-powered assistant built directly into your IDE to accelerate your entire migration journey starting from specification generation to source code and infrastructure as code generation.

Refactor workshop: Mainframe to cloud: Accelerated refactoring at scale with AWS Transform
Embark on a mainframe modernization journey in this hands-on workshop! Discover how AWS Transform for mainframe helps accelerate the modernization of legacy mainframe applications. You’ll learn how it orchestrates the analysis of mainframe codebases, generates documentation, extracts business logic, decomposes monolithic structures, transforms legacy code, accelerates testing phases, and manages the overall journey with human inputs (HITL) when needed. The transformation capabilities of AWS Transform empower you to modernize your critical mainframe applications faster while preserving your business-critical logic throughout the transformation process.

Data modernization workshop: From VSAM to DynamoDB: Reimagining mainframe data for cloud
Explore how to seamlessly migrate mainframe VSAM data to purpose-built AWS datastores like Amazon DynamoDB using Generative AI. In this hands-on builder session, participants will master analyzing VSAM data access patterns, implementing strategic data denormalization, and navigating complex mainframe data architectures to access critical data for faster decision-making. This session addresses both the complete re-imagination of the mainframe data and incremental data augmentation strategies designed to accelerate business intelligence initiatives. Through practical exercises, attendees will gain proficiency in handling complex legacy data structures while implementing modern cloud-native solutions.

Announcements

AWS re:Invent 2025 brought significant product announcements that expand mainframe modernization capabilities. Explore the latest innovations in agentic AI, automated testing, and application reimagining through official announcements and detailed technical blogs that explain how these new features accelerate your transformation journey.

Amazon News

AWS what’s new

Deep dive blog

Explore technical implementation details and architectural patterns through these comprehensive deep-dive blogs.

Summary

This comprehensive roundup brings together everything you need to accelerate your mainframe modernization journey from AWS re:Invent 2025. AWS continues to democratize mainframe modernization access by enabling customized agents that deliver measurable business value. As we look forward to 2026, the vision of scalable, interoperable Agentic AI is already becoming reality and shaping enterprise transformation and modernization journeys. It’s still Day 1 for innovation at AWS and the possibilities are endless.

Ready to reshape your mainframe modernization journey? Reach out to your AWS representative to initiate the conversation.