AWS wants to make the mainframe a relic of the past. The magnitude of challenge ahead is enormous. Not only is the mainframe still present in thousands of companies around the world, but most of them do not plan to get rid of an infrastructure that works well in the short or medium term and in which any change can lead to the company to disaster.
And yet this is precisely what AWS wants to do. Convincing more “traditional” companies that you are much better off in the cloud than on the mainframe. In this sense, in its last AWS re: Invent the company presented its new service «AWS Migration Acceleration Program for Mainframe with which, as explained by himself Adam Selipsky the ultimate goal “is to get customers out of the ‘Big Iron’ as quickly as possible, so they can take advantage of the benefits of the cloud.”
As they abound in Network World, the new service is actually an extension of its existing AWS MAP, to which are added in this vision for the mainframe, new development, test and deployment tools and a mainframe compatible runtime environment.
From mainframe to cloud
To make this possible, the service first assesses the technical readiness of companies to be able to run their applications in the cloud.
Here, the Migration Evaluator projects the total cost of ownership, based on actual utilization of customer resources and AWS’s ability to optimize compute, storage, database, network, and software licenses. .
The program supports two main ways of performing the migration next: “replatforming” and “automated refactoring”, allowing customers to choose between whether they want to move the platform to the new environment or whether it is more interesting to refactor their applications. individually.
On the other hand, the integrated runtime environment provides the compute, memory and storage necessary to run the applications and automatically manages provisioning, capacity, security, load balancing, autoscaling and scaling. application health monitoring.
At the same time, the service includes a Hub from which the migration progress can be followed, which will largely fall on AWS partners, such as Accenture, DCX Technology, Tata, Atos, Micro Focus or Infosys.
