AWS Mainframe Modernization is Now Generally Available

First introduced back in November 2021 at AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced the general availability of AWS Mainframe Modernization this past June 8^th 2022. The new service enables you to migrate and modernize your on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed runtime environment on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

It seems incredible to believe, but the venerable mainframe is still with us even in 2022. Moving away from legacy mainframe applications can be very difficult as these applications often provide business-critical services. These applications can be quite complex, and finding skilled developers can be challenging.

“Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform that allows you to migrate and modernize your on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS,” Amazon explained in the announcement. The AWS Mainframe Modernization service supports two main migration patterns for mainframe applications: replatforming and refactoring.

AWS Mainframe replatforming

AWS Mainframe replatforming enables you to preserve the application assets and programming language with minimal changes while moving your app to a modern infrastructure. There are four steps involved in the replatforming process:

• From the AWS Mainframe Modernization service console, the Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer help companies to get started by analyzing the complexity of their existing applications.
• In the Develop step, companies can use Amazon’s Micro Focus Enterprise Developer to create a modern development environment and test changes with the Enterprise Analyzer.
• In the Deploy stage, Amazon’s Micro Focus Enterprise Server provides scalable deployment environment for rehosting mainframe applications on Linux, Windows, Unix on virtual, Docker containers, or hybrid clouds environments.
• Lastly, companies can use the AWS Mainframe Modernization service to implement more incremental changes once their mainfraime applications has been replatformed. 

AWS Mainframe refactoring

AWS Blu Age is the service used to transform legacy language applications into agile Java-based services, so they can can maintained and enhanced by today’s Java developers and IT professionals. AWS Blu Age 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.

AWS Mainframe Modernization uses on-demand pricing that is based on the instance size that you want to support. On-demand pricing for the AWS Blu Age runtime ranges from $2.50 to $80 per hour. On-demand pricing for AWS Micro Focus runtime ranges from $5.50 to $88.80 per hour, and on-demand pricing for AWS Modernization Micro Focus developer ranges from $2.12 to $34.24.

You can learn more about AWS Mainframe replatforming and refactoring on the AWS website.