Modernizing Legacy Systems: How AWS Transform is Revolutionizing IT Infrastructure

The rapid advancement of technology has opened up new possibilities for organizations, allowing them to modernize legacy systems and build agile infrastructures. Despite these advancements, many enterprises continue to rely heavily on outdated IT infrastructure, such as mainframes and VMware-based systems. These platforms have been the backbone of critical operations for decades, but they often hinder an organization’s ability to innovate, scale effectively, and reduce technical debt in an era where cloud-first strategies dominate. The need to modernize these workloads is evident, but the journey has traditionally been complex and risky.

Challenges in Modernizing Legacy Systems

Modernizing legacy systems presents numerous challenges across financial, technical, and organizational dimensions. Financially, organizations face mounting licensing costs and expensive migration projects. Technically, they must navigate legacy dependencies while meeting compliance requirements. Organizationally, they must manage the transition of teams who’ve built careers around legacy systems and navigate undocumented institutional knowledge.

Introducing AWS Transform

AWS Transform directly addresses these challenges with purpose-built agentic AI that accelerates and de-risks legacy modernization. It automates the assessment, planning, and transformation of both mainframe and VMware workloads into cloud-based architectures, streamlining the entire process. By leveraging intelligent insights, automated code transformation, and human-in-the-loop workflows, organizations can now tackle even the most challenging modernization projects with greater confidence and efficiency.

Modernizing Mainframe Workloads

AWS Transform for mainframe is the first agentic AI service designed for modernizing mainframe workloads at scale. This specialized mainframe agent accelerates modernization by automating complex, resource-intensive tasks across every phase of modernization—from initial assessment to final deployment. It streamlines the migration of legacy applications built on IBM z/OS, including COBOL, CICS, DB2, and VSAM, to modern cloud environments, cutting modernization timelines from years to months.

Key Features of AWS Transform for Mainframe

• Code Analysis: AWS Transform provides comprehensive insights into your codebase, automatically examining mainframe codebases, creating detailed dependency graphs, measuring code complexity, and identifying component relationships.
• Documentation: The service creates comprehensive technical and functional documentation of mainframe applications, preserving critical knowledge about features, program logic, and data flows. Users can interact with the generated documentation through an AI-powered chat interface to discover and retrieve information quickly.
• Business Rule Logic Extraction: AWS Transform extracts and presents complex logic in plain language, enabling both business and technical stakeholders to gain a greater understanding of application functionality.
• Code Decomposition: The solution offers sophisticated code decomposition tools, including interactive dependency graphs and domain separation capabilities, allowing users to visualize and modify relationships between components while identifying key business functions.
• Modernization Wave Planning: AWS Transform creates prioritized modernization wave sequences based on code and data dependencies, code volume, and business priorities, enabling data-driven, customized migration plans.
• Code Refactoring: The service can refactor millions of lines of mainframe code in minutes, converting COBOL, VSAM, and DB2 systems into modern Java Spring Boot applications while maintaining functional equivalence.
• Deployments: AWS Transform provides customizable deployment templates that streamline the deployment process through user-defined inputs, bundling the selected runtime version with the migrated application for seamless deployment.
  

  Modernizing VMware Workloads
  

  With rapid changes in VMware licensing and support models, organizations are increasingly exploring alternatives despite the difficulties associated with migrating and modernizing VMware workloads. AWS Transform is the first agentic AI service for VMware modernization of its kind that helps you overcome these difficulties. It offsets risk and accelerates the modernization of VMware workloads by automating application discovery, dependency mapping, migration planning, network conversion, and EC2 instance optimization, reducing manual effort and accelerating cloud adoption.

  Process of VMware Modernization with AWS Transform
  

  The process is organized into four phases: inventory discovery, wave planning, network conversion, and server migration. It uses agentic AI capabilities to analyze and map complex VMware environments, converting network configurations into AWS built-in constructs, and helps orchestrate dependency-aware migration waves for seamless cutovers. Additionally, it provides a collaborative web interface that keeps AWS teams, partners, and customers aligned throughout the modernization journey.

  Setting Up AWS Transform for VMware
  

  Before using the service, you must first enable it by navigating to the AWS Transform console. AWS Transform requires AWS IAM Identity Center (IdC) to manage users and set up appropriate permissions. With IdC available, you can choose the encryption settings, using either a default AWS-managed key or your custom keys through AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

  Discovery and Deployment
  

  AWS Transform can discover your VMware environment either automatically through AWS Application Discovery Service collectors or by importing existing RVTools export files. The service involves connecting target AWS accounts, validating authorization requests, and configuring Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) settings. The deployment phase requires setting up AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) in the target AWS accounts to automate the migration process.

  Checking Progress
  

  After starting the waves migration process, you can switch to the dashboard at any time to check on progress. This real-time monitoring allows organizations to maintain oversight and adjust strategies as necessary.

  Benefits and Availability
  

  With its agentic AI capabilities, AWS Transform offers a powerful solution for accelerating and de-risking mainframe and VMware modernization workloads. By automating complex assessment and transformation processes, AWS Transform reduces the time associated with legacy system migration while minimizing the potential for errors and business disruption, enabling more agile, efficient, and future-ready IT environments within your organization.

  AWS Transform for mainframe is available in the US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. AWS Transform for VMware offers different availability options for data collection and migrations. For pricing, AWS currently offers core features—including assessment and transformation—at no cost to AWS customers.

  Further Reading
  

  For more information on mainframe modernization, visit the AWS Transform for mainframe page. To explore VMware modernization and learn more about starting your VMware migration journey, visit the AWS Transform for VMware page. Additionally, interactive demos of AWS Transform for both mainframe and VMware are available for a hands-on experience.

  The introduction of AWS Transform marks a significant step forward in the modernization of legacy systems, providing organizations with the tools they need to transition to more modern, efficient, and scalable IT infrastructures.

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