AWS turns-up mainframe migration service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially opened its mainframe-migration service that promises to help Big Iron customers move apps to the cloud.

AWS Mainframe Modernisation, which since last November had been in preview, is available now and offers the tools, infrastructure, and software to manage migration of mainframe applications to the cloud, AWS stated.

The service includes tools to refactor workloads written for mainframes in legacy programming languages such as COBOL to Java-based cloud services. Or customers can keep their workloads as written and re-platform them to AWS with minimal code changes, AWS stated.

The service’s managed runtime environment provides compute, memory, and storage to run both refactored and re-platformed applications and helps automate the details of capacity provisioning, security, load balancing, scaling, and application-health monitoring.

The service’s AWS Migration Hub offers a single location to track the progress of application migrations across AWS and its partner services. Partners include Accenture, DCX Technology, Tata, Atos, Micro Focus, and Infosys. 

Businesses in a variety of industries have relied on mainframes to run business-critical applications for decades, William Platt, General Manager of Migration Services at AWS said in a statement. 

“These businesses naturally want to modernise their mainframe-based applications to reduce costs and eliminate technical debt, but they don’t know how or where to get started,” Platt stated. “AWS Mainframe Modernisation provides the necessary tools for organisations to take full advantage of the elasticity, scalability, and reliability of AWS, while also saving time and money.”

AWS isn’t the only big cloud provider trying to bring Big Iron applications to the cloud. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and others also offer mainframe modernisation services.

IBM continues mainframe development

Not every mainframe-based organisation wants to move to the cloud, and IBM has been diligently enhancing the mainframe and its ecosystem of services to keep the Big Iron the star of customer cloud plans.

In April IBM announced the z16 mainframe that the vendor said caters to enterprise needs, including support for AI, security, hybrid cloud, and open source.

The new, more powerful and feature-rich Big Iron boasts an AI accelerator built onto its core Telum processor that can do 300 billion deep-learning inferences per day with one millisecond latency. The z16’s capacity and encryption features also enable customers to securely run mission-critical applications and processes while also leveraging public cloud services.

The performance and scalability of the new system will also enable more use of the Big Iron in hybrid-cloud environments.

Other new programs target the development of mainframe / cloud environments. TheIBM Z and Cloud Modernisation Stack, announced in February offers industry-standard tools to modernise z/OS applications on a pay-per-use basis.

The service includes support for  z/OS Connect, which utilises a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) interface to tie into and link with existing applications to make Z applications and data part of a hybrid cloud strategy. It also includes z/OS Cloud Broker, which integrates z/OS-based services and resources into Red Hat OpenShift to support  creating, modernising, deploying, and managing applications, data, and infrastructure.

Future z/OS container use cases are planned to promote application modernisation, new application development, and API creation with tight integration to core z/OS applications, IBM stated.

The IBM Z and Cloud Modernisation Stack is the first set of capabilities offered through the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center, which offers tools, training, resources, and ecosystem partners to help IBM Z clients accelerate the modernisation of mainframe applications, data, and processes to work with hybrid-cloud architectures.

Pricing for AWS Mainframe Modernisation

The AWS service costs vary, though customers pay only for what they use, and there are no upfront costs. Third-party license costs are included in the hourly price. Runtime environments for refactored applications, based on Blu Age, start at US$2.50/hour.

Runtime environments for re-platformed applications, based on Micro Focus, start at US$5.55/hour. The Blu Age or Micro Focus includes the software licences. AWS Support plans are available as well. They also cover Blu Age and Micro Focus software.

AWS Mainframe Modernisation is generally available now in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and South America (São Paulo) with additional AWS Regions in the coming months.