AWS says it will cloudify your mainframe workloads AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services. The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are …
When you go into a cloud or its ground level equivalent a fog, it becomes harder to see things and even things you can see are obscured.
I'm not sure why a company would want to cloudify anything.
< finishes reading article >
My apologies. You were correct in your headline.
But if the SLA isn't met (as one day it won't be), what's the compensation? To date it's normally been credit against subscription charges, which go nowhere near the real cost of losing mission critical functionality.
I'm not an insurance expert, but I have a sneaking suspicion that adequate cover against the real costs of cloud SLA failure might be harder to get than insurance against in house service failure, if for no other reason that the event is outside the control of the insured party.
The major hazard of 'cloud' adoption is that you lose control, and can suffer service failure for a wide variety of reasons with no warning. And the idea that it's cheaper than on prem IT will survive only so long as the provider doesn't jack its prices up once you're embedded too deep to extract yourself.
MicroFocus have been trying to convince mainframe users that they can get them off the platform for years - with very limited success. Anyone who had mainframe applications that were easy to migrate away from did so years ago. Those workloads that remain are generally complex and absolutely business critical so remain on the mainframe for very good reasons. I suspect this is another mainframe migration offer that will be doomed to failure and those who try will soon find themselves in year 5 of a 18 month migration project!
"Micro Focus". Two words. Your opinion might be more persuasive if you could get the basic details right.
We've had plenty of success at migrations, thanks. Published figures and success stories are available on the website. The first successful production migration was over two decades ago and they continue to stack up.
Many applications don't need the full capabilities of the mainframe. Many are bound to user workflows with external dependencies and transaction rates are orders of magnitude below what contemporary Windows, Linux, and UNIX systems can comfortably support. Others are report jobs that similarly run comfortably on non-mainframe systems. That's why thousands have been migrated already.
I have no idea how AWS Mainframe Migration will fare; the doors have just opened for business. But on-premises Enterprise Server has been used in production for more than 20 years.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we have plenty of customers happily eating it, year after year.
Has AWS done anything to improve their service uptimes? They've had several major outages, some lasting hours, over the past decade (not all in us-east-1). If I had a mainframe that had been ticking over nicely for a quarter century, I'd need some reassurance that I wouldn't lose data or service and that it would actually cost less in the longer term.
There is an issue with aging staff and skills gap for those running mainframes but I'm not sure cloud is the answer yet.
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