We have been busy…

If you missed our previous blog and our press release, we recommend you catch up on those. Our Micro Focus development teams have been supporting their AWS counterparts as they have been building their new AWS Mainframe Modernization service with Replatforming capability powered by the Micro Focus Enterprise technology and allows customers to analyze, develop, test, and deploy mainframe applications on the AWS cloud.

In this blog, Gary Evans and I, from the Micro Focus Enterprise Product Management team, will look at one aspect of the service: modern, cloud-based development powered by a complete CI/CD pipeline.

Process Modernization. A consistent way for developing mainframe application.

Many organizations are full steam ahead with digital transformation initiatives, aimed at delivering better customer experience and meeting the digital economy’s ever-growing demand for availability and serviceability.

To achieve that, organizations need to increase their development velocity, improve their testing, and adopt agile methodologies and DevSecOps practices.

This is a challenge regardless of the technology stack, but when the development of the core business system takes place on a mainframe, the challenge is even more complex.

Testing resources can be time consuming to provision, application subject matter experts (SMEs) are becoming scarce and new developers find it hard to adopt the more traditional ways of developing software for the mainframe.

This is the foundation, or the problem statement, that the Micro Focus Enterprise Suite sets to solve for mainframe development teams.

• With access to modern, industry-standard tooling, including Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), Enterprise Developer users can maintain their mainframe applications alongside the rest of their application portfolio, using the same tools and processes.
• Enterprise Analyzer provides application wide visualization and understanding integrated into the development environment and kept up to date with code changes.
• Testing bottlenecks can be overcome by provisioning multiple test instances using Enterprise Server which enabled application test automation at unit, functional and system levels. 

These tools integrate with standard source control repositories and Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines that support improved testing and efficient development of mainframe applications, whether these are targeted for deployment back to the mainframe or onto the cloud. 

Introducing AWS Mainframe Modernization Automated DevOps Pipeline

Combining the knowledge and experience in modern mainframe development and testing from Micro Focus with their own expertise in Automated DevOps pipelines in the cloud, AWS have built a templated solution that can be easily and automatically executed to provision cloud-based environments for mainframe application development and deployment using the new AWS Mainframe Modernization service

                                    An example CI/CD pipeline for mainframe workloads

Micro Focus Enterprise tools are integrated with AWS services such as AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline and others to create an end-to-end pipeline.

The pipeline is provisioned automatically using a set of CloudFormation templates and it includes:

• A fully managed Git based source repository using AWS CodeCommit

• Secure, reliable and scalable deployment of Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer and Enterprise Developer using Amazon AppStream 2.0, giving access to analysis and development capabilities from any location without the overhead of a persistent desktop

• Automated builds running inside disposable containers driven by AWS CodeBuild and Enterprise Developer Build Tools. The resulting build artifacts are stored in an S3 bucket for testing and deployment.

• Unit testing environment provided by the on-demand Micro Focus Enterprise Developer capabilities, and automated testing with the provisioning of AWS Mainframe Modernization testing instances powered by Micro Focus Enterprise Server.

• The ability to configure automatic or monitored deployments based on pipeline results using AWS CodeBuild.

A key benefit here is the speed and simplicity of the provisioning process. Customers wishing to access and evaluate the technology can get this pipeline up and running with a working sample mainframe application with a few simple clicks. No installation is needed, and no licensing is required, it just works!

Next step, Application Modernization

Customers that are using Micro Focus Enterprise technology on the AWS Mainframe Modernization platform are now in a much better position to consider onward modernization.

The Micro Focus Enterprise Suite  provides tools and capabilities to modernize core applications by creating microservices, deploying as part of .NET or JVM applications and to modernize the UI. The AWS platform enables further modernization by using different cloud native services. For more information, read Transitioning Mainframe Workloads into Agile Services with AWS and Micro Focus blog post. 

Try it out for yourself

If you’re attending AWS re:Invent virtually then visit the Micro Focus booth and landing page to get started and engaged with Micro Focus and AWS to perform a rapid assessment of your applications.

Alternatively, if you want to try out the AWS Mainframe Modernization managed service for yourself then it is located here:  https://console.aws.amazon.com/m2/home