SAP-C02 Practice Question 70: Cobol Mainframe Automated Refactoring

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 7 · question 10 of 10

Migration and Modernizationhard

An insurer runs about 3.5 million lines of COBOL with CICS transactions, JCL batch jobs, Db2 and VSAM data on a mainframe. The hosting contract ends in 18 months. The few remaining COBOL developers are retiring, so the company does not want to keep COBOL as its long-term language. The goal is a cloud-native Java application that keeps the existing business logic, with the code base analyzed, documented, split into business domains and migrated in planned waves, and with the least possible manual rewriting.

Which approach best meets these requirements?

Show answer and explanation

Answer:

C. Use AWS Transform for mainframe to analyze the code base, decompose it into domains, plan waves and refactor COBOL into Java

AWS Transform for mainframe is designed to *"accelerate the modernization of legacy mainframe applications."* It *"orchestrates the analysis of mainframe codebases, generate[s] documentation, extract[s] business logic, decompose[s] monolithic structures, transform[s] legacy code"*, and it supports z/OS applications written in COBOL and PL/I with JCL, CICS, Db2 and VSAM. It *"automatically refactors COBOL-based mainframe workloads into modern, cloud-optimized Java applications,"* keeping human approval steps for artifacts such as domain decomposition and wave planning (option C).

- A is wrong because rehosting on a COBOL runtime keeps the code in COBOL, so the skills shortage remains, and it adds licensing for the runtime. - B is wrong because a manual rewrite of 3.5 million lines is slow and risky, and it is very unlikely to finish within 18 months with equivalent business logic. - D is wrong because an emulator keeps the mainframe code and its skills dependency. It moves the problem to EC2 rather than modernizing it.

Reference: Modernization of mainframe applications

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