IBM i – What you need to consider moving to the cloud

The IBM i is, by design, a multi-tenant platform that can share and virtualize resources. When I co-wrote the Redbook on modernization in 2014, this was well explained in the Cloud chapter. Multi-tenancy and virtualization are the foundation of Cloud app. The infrastructure is then covered. Now, about your software application, you will have to consider different points that I summarize in this page.

Moving application as-is to an IBM i “in the cloud”

You will have mainly to consider:

• The quality of the User Interface you will want to use
  • Browser screen-scraper from the 5250 screen (green-screen)
  • Browser transformed screen from the green-screen
  • Browser transformed and responsive UI (for browser + mobile)
• The quality of the reporting from spool file
  • spool file to PDF
  • Redesign to new reporting with DB access
  • Redesign to new reporting with DB + logic access
• Scalability & concurrent users if the number of access will change/increase
• Cyber security, 2FA
• Testing strategy before/after
  • Testing will represent 20-30% of the whole project 

This kind of project will likely be considered mainly a modernization

Moving business logic and data from COBOL, RPG, DB2 on IBM i, or other platform, to IBMcloud/GCP/AWS/Azure

You will have mainly to consider:

• The points above with mention transformed & redesigned 
• Database
  • Taking the database as-is, but still:
    • DDS to DDL
    • Check/transform/adapt multi-member if any
    • Check/transform/adapt multi-format if any
    • Check/transform/adapt date-fields that are not real date-type
  • Redesigning it to normalize it
    • Add/leverage SQL features at data-model level 
    • Add/leverage SQL features at table level
• Code
  • Evaluate which target language
    • pros/cons technically & business wise (thoughtful decision)
  • Evaluate the quality of the existing code
    • idiosyncrasies, disparities  – if any
• Scalability & concurrent users
• Cyber security, 2FA
• Testing strategy before/after
  • Testing will represent 30-50% of the whole project 

This kind of project will likely be considered a transformation

In both cases:

You will have to consider:

• Strategy
  • Business targets/deadlines
  • Skill in-house, offshore, in the market
  • Quality/Maintainability of the new code/architecture
  • Governance of the project

These are the main points to have in mind when you face a project like this. 

A last word about AI integration, cloud will definitely help but data quality/format/access and process flow are preponderant. This is another chapter that is covered (and will be extended) in others articles.