Overview: In recent decades, many enterprises have invested significantly in the best available tools to drive transformation. While COBOL and the .NET Framework were once cutting-edge solutions, these choices often led to businesses becoming locked into mainframe or Windows-based environments. Similarly, enterprises that adopted VMware platforms now find it challenging to keep pace with the innovation enabled by cloud-native architectures. As a result, many enterprise IT landscapes still rely heavily on legacy code that underpins critical business functions—creating substantial barriers to digital transformation and slowing the pace of innovation. This ongoing struggle drives enterprises to seek solutions that can effectively migrate and modernize their IT investments.
Amazon Q Developer, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution, aims to streamline and accelerate the modernization of legacy enterprise applications. Using advanced, no-code automated transformations, Amazon Q Developer supports migrating and modernizing a wide range of workloads—from older .NET Framework applications and mainframe-based monoliths to VMware infrastructures—helping businesses embrace cloud-native architectures more efficiently. Amazon Q Developer’s capabilities are Build, Transform, Operate, and Data & AI (see Figure 1 below). This blog post will explore the Transform capabilities of Amazon Q Developer as introduced at re:Invent 2024, held in December 2024 in Las Vegas.
Key Transformation Capabilities of Amazon Q Developer:
1. .NET Workload Modernization:
Amazon Q Developer automates the modernization of legacy Windows-based .NET Framework applications by transitioning them to Linux-based .NET runtimes, such as .NET 6. This process streamlines cloud adoption and involves refactoring code, removing Windows-specific dependencies, and introducing modern patterns for logging, testing, and deployment (microservices or containers). It also reduces costs by eliminating Windows licensing fees and operational expenses associated with legacy frameworks.
2. Mainframe-to-Cloud Replatforming:
Modernizing mainframe environments powered by legacy languages like COBOL and PL/I presents significant challenges. Traditionally, companies relied on specialized experts (systems integrators) to manually convert these programs, which proved costly and time-consuming.
Amazon Q Developer offers a more efficient solution through advanced static analysis and automated code transformation. It converts monolithic mainframe applications, including JCL and data definitions, into modular Java-based microservices. This approach not only migrates workloads from expensive on-premises hardware to the AWS but also modernizes the application architecture by:
- Refactoring code and separating application layers: Improves code maintainability and allows for independent updates.
- Restructuring logic into container-ready components: Enables deployment to AWS container orchestration services like ECS or EKS.
3. VMware-Based Workload Transformation:
Amazon Q Developer streamlines the modernization of VMware applications to cloud-native architectures on AWS. Instead of relying on time-consuming manual refactoring, it uses an automated process to:
- Discover and analyze application components: Identify dependencies and potential conflicts more accurately than manual efforts, using Generative AI trained on massive codebases.
- Modernize applications: Transform monolithic VMware applications into microservices, serverless functions, or containerized workloads.
- Map components to optimal AWS services: Integrate with managed databases, messaging queues, observability tools, and other AWS services.
These transformational capabilities of Amazon Q Developer enable organizations to modernize mainframe, .Net, and VMware applications, gaining the following benefits:
- Cost Reduction: Eliminate manual refactoring, reduce Windows licensing fees, and leverage cost-effective cloud services.
- Scalability and Elasticity: Adapt to changing demands by scaling resources up or down seamlessly.
- Risk Mitigation: Ensure optimal performance, reduce errors, and increase fault tolerance with high availability on AWS.
- Enhanced Agility: Accelerate development cycles, streamline deployments, and improve responsiveness to market changes.
- Reliability and Performance: Achieve high availability, improved fault tolerance, and superior performance through modern cloud-native workflows.
- Integration: Seamlessly connect with cloud services and leverage a unified, cross-platform runtime.
- Accelerated Innovation: Deliver new features faster and improve customer experiences through simplified APIs, streamlined tooling, and a robust open-source ecosystem.
Customer examples:
AWS shared a few customer examples using Amazon Q Developer. Toyota updated its 40-year-old supply chain mainframe applications, saying detailed documentation of hundreds of modules was generated in less than a day. The example underscores the transformative potential of using Generative AI to embark on the makeover of business processes at the enterprise scale. Signaturit Group, a European tech company specializing in electronic trust services, needed to modernize its legacy .NET code to move from Windows to a Linux operating system. By leveraging generative AI tools, developers completed this project in a few days, drastically exceeding expectations by finishing what was initially slated to be a 6-8 month project. Signaturit’s success story highlights how AI empowers organizations to quickly adapt and respond to new challenges.
Summary: Modernizing legacy applications with the help of Generative AI shows great promise, and multiple companies offer such capabilities. Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is another solution, although the converted Java code runs on IBM Z, eliminating the cost benefits of the public cloud.
Amazon Q Developer accelerates the path to cloud-native and is designed to enable a more agile, cost-efficient approach to modernization. Combining advanced code transformation, architectural best practices, and deep integration with AWS empowers organizations to convert legacy applications into cloud-native services with minimal friction. The result is a streamlined modernization journey that retains existing investments while opening the path for innovation and growth in today’s dynamic and digital landscape.