Hi, Thijs from Anubex here. So, in this video I would like to take you through the differences between three terms that, at first glance sound very similar, but are very different when it comes to choosing the right strategy for your mainframe modernization project.
Re-hosting, Re-platforming and Re-factoring, all three of them propose ways of migrating your legacy application to your preferred target platform, such as the cloud, but each in a different way.
Let’s start with the first one, Re-hosting is a very specific approach to make the legacy application work on the target platform. This basically means redeploying the application to the target platform, be it a physical, virtual or cloud based one, without recompiling or modifying code in the application.
This is different to the second method, Re-platforming. Re-platforming will migrate the application to a new runtime platform, but will also make changes, although being minimal ones, like recompiling, in order to adapt the application to your new target platform.
Thirdly, we look at Re-factoring. Re-factoring is a method of migrating the application, also to a new target platform, while also restructuring and, if necessary, optimizing the application code. Optimizing this code, however, will not have any impact on the external behavior of the application, meaning that usage of the application will remain the same after migration, removing any technical debt from the equation. A good example would be transforming COBOL to Java or C#.
Now, Because of this, Re-factoring brings the most benefits to the organization in comparison to Re-hosting and Re-platforming, solving for example the skill issue and making the application future-proof, without adding any more risk to the migration project.
Here at Anubex, we bring Re-factoring to a new level via our methodology, our automated conversion tools AND test tools.
In the end, there are many ways to approach your organizations migration project, but we do hope you now have a good view on the differences between these methods. If you want to hear more information on all the different methods for migration projects, be sure to check out our in-depth video on this. For now, this was all, and I’ll see you next time.
