As we enter a new year, it’s only natural to look back on what we accomplished in the past 365 days. Many of those accomplishments centered around explaining what TSRI does in a way that nearly everyone can understand. Software modernization and refactoring solutions are, by their very nature, complex concepts. Teams of specialized engineers are required to successfully complete each project, and even the simplest automated transformations can take months to get all the right pieces put into place.
In this blog, we highlight some of the most informative pieces published in 2021. These materials were designed to help make the automated modernization process easier to understand and navigate from start to finish. We hope you’ll find them useful as you consider your organization’s IT plans and modernization initiatives for the coming year.
GETTING READY TO MODERNIZE!
Modernizing to the Cloud
Scott Pickett, TSRI’s Vice President of Product Operations and Service Delivery, conducted a live presentation that discussed how automated modernization can help organizations move their applications to the cloud. The presentation resulted in a complete series of videos, all of which are accessible from the post linked above.
Check out this article featuring a downloadable Checklist: Preparing for Cloud Modernization to help you assess your organization’s current assets, including your existing codebase, databases, and other tools that may be installed on your mainframes and other legacy technologies.
MODERNIZE WITH LESS DISRUPTION
One of the major risks of any modernization is the amount of time a system will be taken offline during cutover to the new environment. Any downtime becomes a disruption to the business, whether that means lost revenue or maintaining security of mission-critical systems. This post, 4 Tips for Modernizing with Minimal Business Disruption discusses ways that organizations can mitigate disruption, and also explains how proofs of concepts, step-wise automated migrations, and proper planning play into maintaining continuous uptime.
Common Misconceptions About Modernization (And What to Do About Them)
Application modernization is a game changer in any organization. Oftentimes, perceived obstacles, such as prolonged system downtime, get in the way of bringing mission-critical applications to modern programming environments. This article helps to dispel many of those notions.
Automated Refactoring: The Critical Component to Achieving a Successful Modernization
When any application gets modernized, the codebase shifts from a legacy language such as COBOL or PL/1 to a modern language such as C# or Java. However, just because the language is up to date doesn’t mean the system will operate more efficiently. That’s why refactoring is so important: this automated, iterative process eliminates dead code and redundancies while streamlining the entire application. It’s truly the key to more secure, robust applications.
Microservices Offer Robustness and Security in Modern Systems
Many, if not most of the clients who modernize their mainframes with TSRI started out with monolithic systems. All functions in the workflow relied upon one another, and if one area went down, the entire system went down. Modern software architecture operates using multiple tiers that interoperate with one another, but aren’t dependent on each other. That means if one area goes down, the entire system doesn’t go down with it. A component of this structure, known as microservices, makes for easier software maintenance and also protects organizations while allowing for faster go-to-market strategies for new applications.
Cloud Migration and Containerization: 3 Steps to Reduce Risk and Ensure Success
An important benefit to automated modernization is how the business logic of the transformed application never changes. Sometimes, particularly when modernizing to the cloud, the legacy application may still require some usage. Rather than keep the mainframe in operation or employing some other inefficient, insecure method, transforming to a containerized modern codebase can keep those application instances separate from the rest of its processes. This method increases security and efficiency while allowing for further system development in modern languages.
As you contemplate modernizing your mainframe or embedded-system applications in the new year, we hope these articles will provide you with the knowledge you need to move forward.
TSRI is Here for You
As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.
A $39 billion clothing retailer with 4,300 stores worldwide sought to modernize its suite of mainframe COBOL supply chain applications. These applications supported the client’s unique business process, which provided them with a major competitive advantage and fueled years of unprecedented growth. Today, the clients business logic was preserved and their services are hosted on Azure with data integration directly through service bus queues and scheduling handled via Logic Apps.
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Customer: Retail Client Source & Target Language: COBOL to C# Lines of Code: 86,000 Duration: 3 months Services: Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Testing and Implementation Support, Transformation Blueprint®
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Nearly everyone wants speed, efficiency, and accuracy—especially when it comes to software applications. As companies modernize their legacy codebases and migrate to the cloud, one of the best ways to achieve top performance is to create containers for modernized code.
Code modernization has become increasingly important as we move toward integrated cloud-based and virtualized software environments. While the original legacy code was written to meet the needs of the business at that moment time, modernization of code permits these legacy applications to meet the needs of today’s organization while retaining the integrity of the original business logic. Software developers can then focus on innovation rather than maintenance. Modernization makes it possible to meet the demands of today's infrastructure requirements without high cost or compromises in security or functionality. Companies looking to expand services, access improved processes, and use resources more efficiently will need architectural changes. Bringing these trends together, containerization under Docker and Kubernetes has created a new model for application deployment that provides numerous advantages to program operation and interoperability but requires special accommodation.
Containers provide consolidation benefits by permitting application instances to be stacked in larger virtual machines. Containerization improves efficiency, security, and reduces software licensing. It reduces complexity and ensures application portability, but the boost to protecting an organization’s systems at a time when only 56% of companies are integrating security into their technology strategies cannot be understated, according to Advanced’s 2020 Digital Business Report.
To take advantage of not just the security inherent to containerization, but the potential of having systems that can be ready for the next big advances in computing, applications must be modernized to externalize APIs and microservices. It is also important to ensure proper function within a containerized environment. Modernization transforms legacy applications to operate efficiently, reliably, and securely within the new environment with identical performance to the original application.
The Three-Step Approach: Transform, Cloud-Enable, Containerize & Deploy
When thinking about modernization, organizations can take a three-step approach based on TSRI’s experience in all forms of legacy code transformation, including migration to cloud services and containerization, to reduce risk and increase success:
1. Migrate legacy monolithic code to a service-oriented environment. This includes updating language from COBOL to Java, JavaScript, or C#, changing databases, and enabling microservices. At this step of the process, the migration also begins to abstract underlying services from the application.
2. Integrate service-oriented applications with native cloud services. This includes re-orienting code from WebSphere, DB2, or other legacy platforms to Apache Tomcat, Amazon RDS, or other modern platforms, for example. Upgrading to incorporate the latest native architectural interfaces ensures that applications will tightly integrate with the new environment, and ensures easier updates in future.
3. Transform native cloud to Docker containers. The movement to containers provides additional architectural abstraction and improved integration of applications within the cloud.
As with any kind of migration and modernization, organizations need to assess, tune and optimize their applications for suitability and to ensure that applications will perform adequately within the container environment without infrastructure issues that might arise from coding anomalies.
The key to a successful migration is to evaluate and model the underlying legacy code logic and to pinpoint the areas that require adaptation to the new environment. Not every application has a natural and hazard-free path to a cloud-based containerized solution. Knowledge of container operations such as ephemeral storage and parallelization issues is extremely important in managing this transition. The transformed code must also be optimized to meet the needs of its new environment.
In the case of migrating and modernizing mainframe systems to the cloud, fully automated refactoring technologies such as TSRI’s JANUS Studio® toolset transform legacy applications to cloud-native applications for containerized deployment on multiple cloud providers, including a practice devoted specifically to AWS. TSRI’s model-based solution transforms even large legacy systems written in languages such as COBOL, Fortran, PowerBuilder, Ada, MUMPS, and VB6 into modern applications in cloud-native target architectures.
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TSRI is Here for You
As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.
Get started on your modernization journey today!
Code modernization has become increasingly important as we move toward integrated cloud-based and virtualized software environments. Modernization of code permits legacy applications to continue functioning efficiently and securely without a complete rewrite. This makes it possible to meet the demands of today's infrastructure requirements without high cost or compromises in security or functionality. Companies need to expand services, access improved processes and use resources more efficiently. This demands architectural changes. Bringing these trends together, containerization under Docker has created a new model for application deployment that provides numerous advantages to program operation and interoperability, but requires special accommodation.
