AWS has cut the ribbon on its new AWS Mainframe Modernization service, designed to make it easier for customers to modernize mainframe-based workloads by moving them to cloud.
The tool allows users to refactor their mainframe workloads to run on AWS by transforming their usual mainframe-based applications into modern cloud services. Alternatively, customers can keep their applications as written and re-platform their workloads by reusing existing code and applying minimal changes.
It’s able to do this thanks to its built-in managed runtime environment, which provides the required compute, memory, and storage to run both refactored and re-platformed applications. It also helps automate the details of capacity provisioning, security, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring.
With no upfront costs, customers will only pay for the amount of compute provisioned, Amazon confirmed in its announcement.
“Customers often tell us that AWS is the best place to run any type of application because of its unmatched breadth and depth of purpose-built services. However, businesses in a wide variety of industries have relied on mainframes to run business-critical applications for decades,” commented William Platt, general manager of Migration Services at AWS.
“These businesses naturally want to modernize their mainframe-based applications to reduce costs and eliminate technical debt, but they don’t know how or where to get started.”
AWS Mainframe Modernization also offers continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities, which enable modern application development and deployment best practices. Amazon says that will allow businesses to operate their modernized workloads in production on an ongoing basis and unlock “greater agility, elasticity, and cost savings".
“With AWS Mainframe Modernization, customers and systems integrators can now more quickly and easily refactor or replatform mainframe applications to run in the cloud,” Platt added. “AWS Mainframe Modernization provides the necessary tools for organizations to take full advantage of the elasticity, scalability, and reliability of AWS, while also saving time and money.”
The offering 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). Other AWS Regions are expected to be added in the coming months, the firm said.
