iSeries Modernization has been on the radar of CTOs/CIOs for quite some time now. There are many types of modernization techniques and cloud migration is one of them. There are three main types of migration approach: Re-hosting, batch job migration, Re-architecture. Re-hosting and job migration are the quickest migration method with negligible amount of coding and isn’t extensive, neither expensive.
Application re-architecture, however, involves changing the entire architecture of the application with extensive modification done to source code without altering its external behavior. Typically, most legacy applications have monolithic codes; due to this, it is extremely difficult for these applications to be upgraded and when moved to cloud they may still have issues, which can take a very long time to pinpoint and fix since the code isn’t modified to fit the cloud native microservices architecture. Making your iSeries applications cloud native can enable your application take the advantage of all the capabilities that the cloud provides, which include scalability, security, to name a few.
Micro-services: Modern applications run logics without worrying about the hardware & servers, and the computing time is inversely proportionate to the costs involved. This can be done by using a cloud- based API gateway and serverless applications with the like of AWS Lambda/Azure functions, etc. These can decouple business functionalities and can be managed at larger scales using services that open- source clouds offer.
Application, containers, and queues: Message queues is a form of asynchronous service to services communication used primarily in serverless and microservices architecture. Containers are typical option for deploying software and managing them, they are used to abstract applications from physical environment in which they are running. The cloud container services (also known as dockers) along with message queues are core to the execution of any process & application service.
Data persistence & Data Lake: When you create an automation application, you can enable data persistence function for your data variable objects. This effectively keeps the data intact even when the server goes down or crashes. Data lakes helps with housing extremely large data volumes. The cloud container services (also known as dockers) along with message queues are core to the execution of any process & application service. These can decouple business functionalities and can be managed at larger scales using services that open-source clouds offer.
Data analytics, artificial intelligence & machine Learning: Data analytics, AI and ML can assist with making as400 applications cloud native. When the information is checked for wellbeing and quality, the subsequent stage is to create numerous bits of knowledge for navigation. More up to date strategies and rule-driven methods like machine learning and AI reasoning can assist companies with performing predictive analytics and AI driven automation on top of the current framework activity.
As mentioned above, if you are considering AS400 migration, re-architecting the iSeries applications to be cloud native helps organizations take full advantage of the various benefits that the cloud has to offer. If you are looking to migrate your AS400/iSeries to cloud, but not sure what approach to take, drop us a note, our team maybe the light at the end of the tunnel.
Prateek is a B2B tech marketer with a keen interest in content marketing. B2B writer by day, Netflix junkie & gamer by night.