IBM Mainframe to Microservices on AWS Lambda (Done In 60 Seconds)

That’s right — in 60 seconds. We’re going to use Heirloom® to take a COBOL/CICS transaction from an IBM Mainframe application and deploy it as a microservice on Amazon’s AWS Lambda serverless infrastructure, using Lambda’s latest feature — layers.

With serverless computing, you run code without provisioning or managing servers (zero administration effort), required resources are continuously scaled (automatically), and costs are only incurred when your code is running (measured in sub-seconds).

Microservices provide a model for delivering high-quality applications that are agile, scalable, and available.

IBM Mainframes are archaic, inflexible, and expensive — but they are where 70% of the world’s business transactions are processed. By replatforming those transactions to the cloud, you can make them agile.

Ready?

What happened?

• We used Heirloom to replatform (which basically means recompiling) a mainframe COBOL/CICS application to 100% Java and deployed it locally under Apache Tomcat. The data in this example resides in an AWS Aurora database.
• We then extracted the “Get Customer Credit Limit” method, along with a facade, packaged it as a jar, and uploaded the function to AWS Lambda as an application layer.
• Finally, we associated the application layer with the Heirloom runtime layer (which is basically a Java framework for executing batch and online mainframe applications). The microservice is now deployed.

Of course, the transformation from an application architecture that was ushered into existence when IBM released the System/360 back in 1964, is not going to be a simple task (especially when refactoring your data), but it is possible. Transactions are a good place to start when thinking about how to encapsulate your business logic as microservices.