AWS promises to rescue your legacy code again

AWS is back with another pitch to save your enterprise from the sins of software past, this time with a fresh round of upgrades to AWS Transform, its AI-powered toolkit for modernising legacy systems. That includes everything from Windows servers stuck in time to mainframes old enough to qualify for a pension.

The offer is straightforward: point Transform at your tangled codebase and let the service refactor its way to something more survivable. Amazon says customers are already seeing Windows modernisation run “up to 5x faster than manual processes.” Sanjay Brahmawar, chief executive of QAD | Redzone, adds: “AWS Transform has completely changed” the challenge of upgrading heavily customised systems.

Amazon is also highlighting some large numbers. The service has already modernised 1.1 billion lines of code and saved 810,000 hours of manual effort. Air Canada reports an 80 per cent reduction in expected time and cost after using Transform to refresh thousands of Lambda functions, which is remarkably efficient for an industry where efficiency is usually theoretical.

The latest update extends support for mainframe and VMware modernisation with improved agents for code analysis and migration planning. In theory, this should reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises lurking inside ageing estates, especially when the people who built them are no longer available to explain what they were thinking.

AWS is pitching the whole effort as a way to shed technical debt and improve operational efficiency, which is polite cloud terminology for encouraging organisations to stop running business-critical systems on ageing machines that should have been retired years ago.

Anyone seeking more detail, validation or moral support can find it on the AWS Transform product page.