Mainframe Application Modernization with AWS
Navigate your path from mainframe to cloud with confidence
Why modernize mainframe applications with AWS?
Mainframe applications power your most critical business processes, but aging platforms constrain innovation, limit access to AI, and depend on a shrinking talent pool. AWS helps you modernize these applications through multiple pathways, whether you need to reimagine them as cloud-native services, refactor to modern languages, integrate mainframe data with cloud analytics, or run a hybrid model. With proven methodology, agentic AI services, certified partners, and acceleration programs, AWS meets you where you are in your modernization journey.
Benefits
Move away from rigid monoliths and outdated interfaces. AWS offers horizontal scalability with virtually unlimited capacity to handle workload peaks and spikes while minimizing unused capacity. Unlock core business processes and data by taking advantage of modern protocols, APIs, and cloud-native integration patterns.
Customers who modernize mainframe workloads on AWS reduce infrastructure costs by 60-90%, freeing budget for experimentation and innovation. Break data silos, make mainframe data available to a wider range of stakeholders, and gain access to AI, analytics, and machine learning tools to derive more value from your most critical business data.
Transition to modern languages such as Python, Java, or .NET and gain access to a large pool of skilled architects and developers. Moving to a modern technology stack resolves the mainframe skills gap, attracts new talent, and positions your applications to take advantage of AI, serverless, containers, and the full breadth of AWS services.
Tools for transformation
AWS Transform for mainframe
AWS Transform for mainframe is an agentic AI service that automates the most complex phases of mainframe modernization at scale, from analyzing millions of lines of code to extracting business logic, decomposing monolithic applications into business domains, and generating modern application architectures. AWS Transform supports multiple modernization patterns including reimagine (cloud-native microservices) and refactor (COBOL to Java with functional equivalence). Core features, including assessment and transformation, are available at no cost.
Experience-Based Acceleration for Mainframe
Prove the approach on your code before committing to a full program. Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) is a hands-on workshop where AWS runs your actual mainframe code through the modernization workflow, delivering working results in days. You get evidence from your own environment to make informed decisions and build stakeholder confidence.
AWS Migration Acceleration Program
The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Mainframe helps organizations reach their modernization goals through proven methodologies, AWS services, tools, and investment incentives. The three-phase approach (assess, mobilize, migrate and modernize) reduces complexity and maximizes success, helping organizations confidently transform mission-critical mainframe workloads while reducing risk and costs.
AWS Mainframe Modernization Competency Partners
AWS and our mainframe modernization partners have helped hundreds of organizations successfully transform complex mainframe environments into agile cloud services with speed and confidence. From initial assessment and planning through implementation, our partners provide innovative tools and specialized expertise to ensure successful outcomes during modernization and beyond.
Recognized leadership
AWS is a leader in ISG Provider Lens Mainframe Application Modernization Software U.S. quadrant 2026 report
ISG, a leading global technology research and advisory firm, has recognized Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a leader in the Provider Lens Mainframes Application Modernization Software quadrant for the fifth consecutive year.
"AWS applies a pragmatic, multipattern approach to comprehensive mainframe modernization. Through AWS Transform for mainframe, it blends deterministic analysis with agent-driven automation to extract business logic, decompose and refactor or reimagine workloads, embed testing, and coordinate partners with traceability and human oversight."
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