The U.S. Air Force's Integrated Logistics System - Supply (ILS-S), has been a cornerstone of military logistics for over five decades. This complex and mission-critical system, which tracks more than 35 million assets valued at $18 billion across 1.7 million warehouse locations, has been a significant part of the Air Force's operations, supporting 18,000 users and over 100,000 consumers of ILS-S information across 250 military installations.
Historically, the Air Force had attempted to modernize and move away from expensive Unisys Mainframes without success. Their earlier endeavors earned the system the nickname "The Beast" and was featured in a 2003 book on legacy system modernization by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon.
However, the outcomes changed dramatically when TSRI, NTT Data, and CGI leveraged TSRI’s model- and rule-based transformation and refactoring solution, JANUS® Studio, to modernize the 1.3 million lines of COBOL to Java and migrate the system to an elastic, secure, cloud-native environment on AWS GovCloud.
Watch Paul Saladna, Lead Architect at NTT Data discuss what made this project so successful!
In the initial phase, TSRI converted the 1.3 million lines of Unisys COBOL to modern, maintainable Java and the teams migrated the system to an on-prem mid-tier environment. In a second phase, the application underwent further automated refactoring by the teams for code quality and performance and then migrated to the AWS GovCloud, gaining the benefits of a cloud-native, scalable multi-tier environment like setting up DevSecOps and CI/CD pipelines and providing network interoperability.
This transformative project marked a significant milestone in automated modernization and cloud-native deployment for the Air Force and has been heralded as a huge success by the USAF, setting a precedent for future modernizations.
“All told, we started at $30 million prior to the modernization and ended at about $3 million post-modernization; a pretty significant cost savings!”
Paul, who started with ILS-S back in 2003, played a pivotal role in transitioning the system from a fragmented, green-screen-based setup to a unified cloud-computing solution. His leadership was instrumental in steering the project from its inception, through its on-prem modernization phase, to its ultimate migration to a cloud-native architecture on AWS.
The modernization's driving forces were multifaceted, focusing on reducing infrastructure costs, mitigating COBOL developer dependency, and enhancing platform stability and capabilities. The Air Force required a fast and seamless transition with no loss in functionality or performance, despite the concurrent challenges posed by active military engagements.
The decision to adopt AWS GovCloud was influenced by the Air Force's existing computational frameworks and the natural fit of AWS for Java/Python-based projects, given its extensive use and the associated economies of scale.
TSRI was chosen for this monumental task through a rigorous selection process, showcasing unparalleled automation capabilities and a thorough understanding of the legacy COBOL code, which set them apart from other vendors.
“TSRI demonstrated the highest degree of conversion capabilities and past performance and represented the lowest risk for us to achieve mission objectives. Really, they stood out.”
The outcomes of this modernization are profound, achieving a 90% reduction in total costs—from $30 million annually to approximately $3 million post-modernization. Additionally, the project facilitated the reassignment of COBOL developers to roles where their deep understanding of the system's logic and business requirements could be leveraged for the modernized ILS-S system.
The modernized ILS-S now boasts a remarkable 99.999% uptime, a testament to the enhanced platform stability and capabilities achieved through this project. This success has prompted the Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate (BES) of the USAF to replicate this modernization model across other critical systems, with TSRI currently working on the modernization of the Air Force's wholesale Stock Control System.
This journey from COBOL to Java, culminating in a truly cloud-native deployment on AWS, not only signifies a technological leap for the Air Force but also exemplifies a model of collaboration, innovation, and strategic foresight in modernizing critical defense systems.
To learn more about the project, read the case study
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No change in business logic.
Reduction in overhead costs.
Continuous development during and after migration.
These are a few modernization concepts that Scott Pickett, TSRI’s Vice President of Product Operations and Service Delivery, discussed on his recent appearance on Amazon Web Services’ APN TV channel.
“TSRI allows for an ability to do automated transformation of not only your language, but your application to the cloud environment, allowing you to bring in skilled, modern technology to your legacy implementations, being able to drive down the cost point associated with ongoing operational costs, and being able to deliver new applications, new functionality, new screens, and new capabilities in that modern language,” he said in his talk.
So what does that mean, exactly?
In TSRI’s modernization of a major European bank to the cloud, that meant they modernized approximately 80,000 lines of code at 99.7% automation. In other words, only 384 of those lines of code were hand-written. That's big for a project of this size—but it's huge when you're talking about applications with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code!
For any organization, whether in commercial enterprise organizations like the banking client mentioned above, or in government agencies, modernization reduces risk.
“You're able to bring a new skill set, new experts that know Java and know CI and CD tools and apply them to your legacy application that's been modernized,” Scott said. “It literally also allows for the ability to drop tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars, off your monthly costs.”
As Scott also noted in his presentation, “we can not only transform code quickly…because there are very, very few manual changes, but it also means that you can migrate to the cloud and then be able to not have any business logic change associated with that migration.”
Maintaining business logic is a big deal when it comes to systems that measure their age in decades rather than years and the original programmers have long since moved on.
One other interesting point Scott brought up is how TSRI’s tools have enabled customers to maintain agility and competitive advantage by providing its clients with the modern, cloud-based applications they need—all while reaching back to its legacy DB2 database that supports the applications that have yet to be modernized.
Throughout the talk, Scott also pointed to how TSRI has adopted a step-wise model, which modernizes small applications or pieces of an application, tests for validity, then pushes into production before the next applications are transformed. Such a methodology allows the client to continue to develop in the legacy language, maintain a common data set, and minimizes business disruption to almost zero.
“There’s no big delay. You can continue developing the legacy and we can migrate those legacy applications while the transformations are happening and migrate them into your modern environment,” he said.
Scott also explains the steps of an automated migration in layman’s terms and how a TSRI transformation integrates cleanly into cloud services like AWS using containerization and microservices.
We of course don’t want to spoil the presentation by giving everything away, so head over to APN TV and watch for yourself to learn about how automated modernization to the cloud will save your organization time, money, and the headaches from continuing to maintain legacy systems.
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.
