>> Hey, friends, if you have business applications that are
still running in an IBM or Unisys mainframe environment,
you're probably dealing with increasing maintenance cost
and a shrinking workforce to keep these applications working.
Steve from Astadia's here to show us how
you can make Azure your new mainframe,
by migrating those applications to
the Cloud today, on Azure Friday.
Hey, friends, I'm Scott Hanselman and it's Azure Friday.
I'm here with Steve Stewart from Astadia,
and we're talking about the mainframe,
which is actually where I got started.
I was doing a lot of mainframe work,
talking to banks running mainframes.
>> Yeah. It's been around for a long time,
and this is a new era,
Azure is the new mainframe.
>> So, Azure is the new mainframe.
When I was doing mainframe work,
we never really saw them.
I think one time I got a tour.
>> Right.
>> I could go and visit the refrigerator.
>> Yes.
>> In a big Costco warehouse.
>> Right.
>> But that's also the Cloud.
It's a big mysterious computer I can't visit.
>> Right. So, the mainframe is the granddaddy of Cloud,
it was the original Cloud.
Everybody had a terminal connected to
something out there in the middle of nowhere, same thing today.
You just RPCN, log in to your Azure environment,
and that's why Azure is the new mainframe.
>> Now, modernizing those applications
sounds like a complicated thing.
I would assume most people just don't want to anger the mainframe,
or just leave it running forever.
>> Yeah. That's the impression,
and what we need to do is educate the folks that,
there is a new mainframe out there.
Azure has a new mainframe,
and we provide the transition of
those mainframe assets into the new mainframe which is Azure.
>> Well, this is a mainframe application.
We've all seen these, they're great
because they're fast and they're powerful.
>> Right.
>> They just work.
>> Right.
>> So, we need our new mainframe to work at the same way.
>> The same way, that's right.
This is a standard green screen environment right now,
that you can see it's just a standard
BMS running on your mainframe,
and then what we can do is just, it's running on Azure.
So, this is your new mainframe.
So, we'll walk you through that transition
of taking those assets over there.
The process for doing that,
this is the mainframe that we're talking about right now,
is that we do an inventory of everything you have,
especially if you have a mainframe has been around
for 30 years, there's a lot of stuff.
Imagine clean out your garage,
has been there for 30 years.
There's a lot of stuff in there, so focus on
what meets, drives your business.
So, you got to do that assessment of everything that's there,
and align yourself with the programs that run your business.
>> Okay. So, you do kind of an inventory,
an intellectual property inventory.
Say, I've got a bunch of COBOL code.
I probably got a DB2 database.
>> All right.
>> This is the mission critical part of my business.
>> Right. Assembler, all those things,
and then we start doing the mapping,
what we call it an Azure mapping exercise.
>> Does a mainframe map to
the Cloud? I mean, is that mapping is impossible?
>> Maps perfectly because you built
Cloud to run Fortune 500 business.
The reason Fortune 500s
depend on mainframe because the reality is,
they don't crash as often.
So, you have built a framework, equivalent framework.
SQL server if it blows up,
it recovers, there's all these recovery functions that had been,
all the investments that you guys have been doing over the years,
you've created a mainframe equivalent in the Cloud.
>> It was and I think it was Thomas Watson from IBM who
said that there was a market for maybe five machines,
and I think that he thought there'd
be basically a mainframe on each continent.
>> Right.
>> Now, we have 20 or 30 data centers all over the place.
>> Right.
>> Theoretically, if I move my mainframe application to the Cloud,
I'm going to get more availability
and basically virtual mainframes all over the world.
>> Anywhere. So, if I'm a small business owner have
a mainframe application that my mark just
happens to be North America because that's where my mainframe is,
imagine going to the Cloud,
and be able to open up the world to,
you don't need to buy a mainframe in different countries,
you just install it on a data center.
So, we're seeing the big interest in the ISB market,
to move some of that workloads over.
>> Okay. Is this something where you're getting
code reuse and database reuse like 90 percent?
How much new code am I going to have to write?
>> Well, you don't have to write a lot of new code
because the path that we're talking about is
taken the existing COBOL and
DB2 can happen that over to Azure SQL,
and into a new COBOL, Micro Focus COBOL.
>> Okay.
>> Micro Focus is not new,
it's been around for 40 years,
but the newer versions,
it's a managed code set, is.NET.
So, you are able to consume classes,
and you can create classes within your COBOL to be leveraged.
So, if you look at your digital journey, I'm a CEO,
I'm hearing all about AI and
Power BI and all these analytics stuff,
but all my stuff is in coupon green screen,
transition it over, it's down through the CLR level.
I can then call AI,
do machine learning, I could do all those things.
I have all this dormant data that
exists on the mainframe then now is exposed.
You don't have that today in your OS.
You do have it when you go to Azure,
so that gives you the agility.
>> That's exciting. So, you're using COBOL,
you're talking to the.NET Framework,
and the future.NET Core.
>> Right.
>> You've been brought into the future,
but all that intellectual property in
your COBOL code is maintained.
>> Your business rules,
everything that you currently have are
there and now can be exposed and leveraged.
>> Did you have a diagram that shows that mapping between.
>> Yeah. Let me show you.
This is what a mainframe looks like for
the folks that never seen the mainframe,
but here's the mapping of it, right?
So, what we currently have is that everything on the top,
and the goal is we do an Azure mapping.
So, what do you have on a mainframe?
I have security RectF.
Okay. We're going to use Azure AD,
and LDAP for that,
and a lot of times it's role-based security,
so we'll also leverage Azure SQL to provide all of those things.
We're here to replicate functionality not duplicate it.
So, you have Assembler, "Why you're using Assembler?"
"Oh, we did this as a routine."
Okay. We don't need it, we have a.NET, which we can leverage here,
and we do that mapping.
Once that mapping is done,
then we compile and start testing,
we have to validate that the transition was there.
There's a lot of EBCDIC to ASCII,
things that we deal with, but
all of that comes through the testing.
Once you're done, give you the keys
that you're running on Azure, and away you go.
>> I love that some of the younger people who are
watching are going to have to look up EBCDIC and figure it out,
what that means EBCDIC to ASCII.
Now, this also, I'm thinking from a modernization perspective,
once it's moved to Azure,
once it's moved to a COBOL running,
Micro Focus COBOL running on.NET, I could put a Rest,
a modern Rest API on top of my mainframe application, couldn't I.
>> Yes, and that stuff is totally supported.
So, depending on what you want to do,
you have to kill the mainframe.
You can lose a lot of this stuff and leverage
things there on the mainframe, right?
Microsoft has got a product HIS as
part of the BizTalk Group that supports that,
so you can definitely leverage that.
Then also, you can do the Big Bang, move everything on down.
So, really is how
the clients want to do this, and that's what we're seeing.
>> Yeah. We had a great Azure Friday episode
on Integration Services Environments,
where you could put together a virtual network
and have Azure talk to your mainframe.
So, I like what you just said that there's
a realization that we're not saying abandon the mainframe,
using modernize the mainframe.
>> Modernizing. So, you can lease up up there, bring things down.
I had a client that's going to keep
all their assemblers on a mainframe,
and move all the COBOL down.
So, it's like an extension,
until you have a hybrid environment of your mainframe in Azure,
and that's what the world's going today.
>> Well, what's nice about that is
the acknowledgment that reality is a hybrid,
and then it's not always going to be clean.
>> Right.
>> Sometimes it's going to be
a combination of these different things,
but they all work well together,
we're really standing on the shoulders of giants.
>> That's correct. I mean, this is really funny,
if you look at what's inside the Azure Framework,
there's a lot of mainframe qualities within,
and that's why you're able to do a lot of these things.
So, it's back to the points,
is very important that once you do this transition,
treat it like a mainframe,
just because you move it to one VM,
and then VM blows up,
then, "Oh, well, the Cloud doesn't work well."
If you don't architect like a mainframe,
this is an example of how we do this,
where we leverage Azure Traffic Manager
with multiple regions to give you
that fault tolerance type capability that exists on a mainframe,
leverage Azure SQL replication services.
Those types of things.
So, we have it using the Azure Load Balancer
or Azure Traffic Manager and multiple regions.
So, mainframe class architecture that exists in Azure,
and that's what we're providing.
Actually, you're providing that.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> We're leveraging that.
>> Right.
>> Astadia is providing the tools and
services and the partnership to go in and make that.
So, it sounds like Microsoft has
partners that can help you make this happen,
like Astadia, and this isn't something that's new or cutting edge.
You've done this hundreds of times.
>> We've done this a couple of hundred times,
and we're seeing a lot of interest
right now are really busy on that.
But, Microsoft has an eye on the ball here as well.
Bob Ellsworth from Microsoft is dedicated,
got a mainframe team on this,
they've got a lot of mainframe folks that works on that group,
and they're dedicated on
helping you transition some of these things over,
and they have a partner ecosystem that leverage them,
and I'm proud to be one of those,
and that's their role.
>> That's exciting. I think that that means that
really the work now is just getting the word out.
>> Getting the word out.
>> Someone out there feels locked into their mainframe.
>> Right.
>> They feel uncomfortable about that.
>> Right.
>> They're hearing Cloud, everything,
and they think that their work needs to be
rewritten as opposed to migrate it.
>> They don't have to rewrite it. So, let me tell you a secret,
you own a mainframe, Microsoft has an IBM mainframe,
and they do development,
that's how they support HIS.
>> Say, I want to visit it. IBM refrigerator.
>> Is in campus.
>> Somewhere in campus.
>> Yeah. So, but that's just shows you the investment and
a dedication to Microsoft to talk
about how to transition both workloads over.
But if you look at, like I said,
I want to go to AI and Power BI,
they think they have to rewrite everything, they don't.
>> So, that's interesting also that there's
technologies like AI, facial recognition,
all the different things that machine
learning and AI could provide you,
that were not as mature or didn't exist 40 years ago.
You're telling me that I can take a mature mainframe application,
and now AI enable it.
>> Right. Let's talk about a company who
wants to authenticate users.
They have the John Doe,
and they know what the person has it,
you just add a JPEG of a picture of that,
then you leverage on the Azure Framework to scan
all those facial recognitions and
associate that key with that name.
So, when you go into the front of
a camera, it shows you who you are.
>> You are effectively getting Windows Hello into your mainframe.
>> In to your mainframe application's pretty,
and that's a very simple example,
and before we had to write everything in C# and do all this stuff.
Right now, I just take it, I just
call it as a class, it's a class.
>> The applications that we think of as
mainframe applications are usually
terminal for there be VT100 or whatever,
do they remain that way or is that
really up to us as the migration?
>> It's up to you, is your digital journey, right?
So, the first thing we tried to do if you go from
a proprietary computing model
to a commodity-based computing model,
the cost differences are almost 60-70 percent.
>> Okay.
>> Run the mainframe workloads on those.
So, the first thing we want to do is rapid exit.
Then, you look at do I want to change the UI.
Now, there's arguments to be said that there's
super-users that can tab really quickly. I do a lot.
>> Text mode, frankly, is underrated.
>> Right. So, they can go into really quickly.
So, you really don't want to impact
the productivity of your super sweeze that are out there.
So, it's in the depends.
If it's a end-user, a log in,
and do some sort of a call,
and you don't want to give them a green screen,
you may want to do a nice UI.
So, you do that assessment is phase two,
but the first thing you want to do is move everything quickly.
My suggested, don't go and do UI for everybody because
you're going to impact the productivity of
your super users with macros and all that stuff.
>> That's true. It's also worth pointing out just as an aside that
Windows 10 has made huge improvements
in the console, there's now VT100.
>> Yeah.
>> SSH built in.
You get those terminal UIs and
those existing power users can have a great terminal experience.
>> Right.
>> While you work on designing something else particular.
>> That's correct.
>> Yeah. Or even plugging in,
I suppose mobile applications.
>> Mobile applications are signings.
You'd basically you could do HTML5.
So, you have different types of real estate to work
with and different iPads source,
whatever Android devices you currently have.
So, you're able to take your mainframe applications and have that,
and they work on the screens too.
So, there's a lot of things you can do with that.
>> So, once I've got it into Azure, it's in Azure,
it's not necessarily specialist
just yet another Azure applications.
So, then all the Azure things,
Logic Apps and batch,
and everything becomes available.
>> It's Azure native.
It's just if I was writing a C# because it's
down to the CLR level to managed code set,
which by the way is with JB between
Microsoft and Micro Focus that provided that.
Your IDE is Visual Studio,
you can leverage TFS.
So, you look at how you're bringing in all of
the older technologies to
the newer technologies, and that's all ready to go.
>> I think you had a screenshot where you showed
Visual Studio but also people using Eclipse.
>> That's correct. So, the investment,
our partner Micro Focus is one of the tools that we use,
it's been around a long time, and they
support both Eclipse and Visual Studio.
So, if you look at the oldest,
I can't find COBOL programmers,
and that's what happen is that,
they would take them to the green screen tab.
This is your new job.
>> They understand Eclipse or Visual Studio,
and they go, "Whoa, where's my mouse?",
and there's no mouse, is you tab over a couple of times,
and he has a little x going back, go up and down.
But if I go and give them a Visual Studio with IntelliSense,
I can hover over and see the values
and all of those things that exists within Visual Studio.
That's a really good programmer on
Visual Studio with all the COBOL plugins can read the code.
>> Yeah.
>> Because COBOL is moved value here,
it's not a hard language to pick up.
So, I'm always in the camp that I can find COBOL programmers,
they're the C# guys coming out of school.
>> Yeah.
>> Because I put them in a quick book
at Boot Camp and they're ready to go.
>> Fantastic.
>> Well, there's a lot of guys and girls
out there that are doing work in
COBOL that can then find a new modern experience in the Cloud,
and they can go assist,
as well as younger people that are coming out,
they can easily pick up something like
this in an environment that they're familiar with.
>> Right.
>> So, where can people learn about this?
>> Well, in Microsoft, there's a site that's up there,
Azure microsoft.com migration, is there,
there's a dedicated site with all the ecosystem,
white papers, and things like that.
>> It looks like migrate at Microsoft.com is
a distribution list that is
dedicated to finding out what partners,
what tools that you can use.
>> That's correct.
>> Thank you so much, Steve Stewart from Astadia.
>> I appreciate it.
>> I am learning all about how to migrate
my mainframe applications to the Cloud today, on Azure Friday.
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