Which is better – the mainframe or AWS?

We’ve been talking about hybrid cloud and mainframes for a while now. In fact, IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report” 2021 found that although the average cost of a breach increased to $4.24 million, for hybrid cloud users, a breach cost was less at $3.61 million. IBM is very keen on hybrid cloud. You remember they bought Red Hat, and their whole thrust is to get mainframe sites to use the Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud container platform, which allows users to develop and consume cloud services anywhere and from any cloud. They also provide IBM Cloud Pak solutions, their AI-infused software portfolio that runs on Red Hat OpenShift

The idea of a mainframe as being an isolated silo of green screen technology has been a thing of the past for a long time now. It started with people Web-enabling CICS applications, and has gone on from there. Mainframes can quite easily take part in the API economy and very often do. They use the same RESTful connectivity as developers on mobile phones. In addition, mainframes are now happily running open-source software such as Zowe, and much else that makes it easier for non-mainframe-trained IT professionals to work on a mainframe as easily as any other platform.

The bottom line is that mainframes have continued to re-invent themselves over the past 50 plus years in much the same way that aeroplanes and cars have. And, a mainframe is in many ways closer to a Formula 1 racing car than some down-at-heel vintage vehicle. Mainframes offer the best security of any platform with pervasive encryption and data passports. They can happily talk to SIEMs and much else running on distributed platforms. And they can communicate easily with applications running in the cloud. So, mainframers don’t only understand how mainframes work, they have a great appreciation for other platforms and understand that applications should run on the most appropriate platform available.

So, with the constant enhancements to mainframes, and with more expected in 2022 with the new Telum processors, it’s always a bit of an irritation to find non-mainframers using the word ‘modernization’ when they simply mean changing platform – or migration. The two words are not synonymous!

Anyway, Amazon’s used its AWS re:Invent conference at the end of November to announce a new platform called “AWS Mainframe Modernization”. This, they say, will help AWS customers get off their mainframes “as fast as they possibly can” in order to take better advantage of the cloud. Amazon suggests that it can cut the time it takes to move mainframe workloads to the cloud by as much as two-thirds, using its set of development, test, and deployment tools plus a mainframe-compatible runtime environment.

Their solution also helps customers (gosh, I was going to write victims!) assess and analyse how ready their mainframe applications are to be modernized. Amazon reckons that mainframe sites will either lift and shift their application to the new platform, or they could break down their applications into microservices. In this case, the mainframe workloads will be transformed into Java-based cloud services. Whatever route they choose, changing platform is a complex process requiring access to the original source code, working out application dependencies before even starting to recompile the code on the new platform and testing that it still works.

For ‘lift-and-shifters’, the Mainframe Modernization solution offers compilers to convert code as well as testing services to make sure that all the necessary functionality is retained on the new platform. For sites choosing the microservices or refactoring route, and if the components could be run in EC2, in containers, or in Lambda, the Mainframe Modernization solution can automatically convert the COBOL code to Java. There’s a Migration Hub, which allows customers track their migration progress across multiple AWS Partners and solutions from a single location.

The service includes a runtime environment on EC2, with certain configurations of compute, memory, and storage. Amazon boasts that the system is agile and cost-efficient (with on-demand, pay-as-you-go resources, load balancing, and auto-scaling) offering security and high availability, scalability, and elasticity.

It seems that systems integrators will do much of the hard work when it comes to moving applications to the cloud. They will do this using the components provided by AWS.

Adam Selipsy, CEO of AWS, said that AWS is seeking to make the cloud cost effective “for every workload” including IBM System z workloads. He went on to say: “Mainframes are expensive. They’re complicated. And there are fewer-and-fewer people who are learning to program COBOL these days. This is why many of our customers are trying to get off of their mainframes as fast as they possibly can to gain the agility and the elasticity of the cloud.”

Of course all this was before the big AWS outages on 15 December and 7 December.

I can see that the cloud has a lot of appeal. And there are now plenty of people with some cloud experience who prefer to work in a cloud environment. I’m also sure that there are some mainframe sites that would probably find it more economic to use a different platform. What I’m also sure about is that most mainframe sites won’t find any advantage in moving wholesale into the cloud. Their mainframes provide so many security advantages that they are better off retaining the platform. I’m also sure that some workloads could run partly or wholly in the cloud. I’m just not a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water-type of thinker. I don’t believe moving to the cloud is ‘modernization’, it’s just migration.

I also have this nagging worry about cloud security. What if, in 2021, there had been a massive breach in cloud-based applications? Who would know? What benefit is there to any organization to reveal that they have been breached, particularly if it was a breach of their applications in the cloud?

Good luck to AWS and any mainframe sites that do decide to migrate completely off the platform. But for most organizations, I still think a third way is best, which is the hybrid approach.

 

And, if you celebrate it, merry Christmas. I’ll be back in 2022!