Background and Basics In a recent project engagement, we were assigned the job to migrate a COBOL-based mainframe application to a new environment. The core theme specifically for this project follows a re-hosting approach. The reasoning for this type of approach is agreed upon with the customer mainly due to time and cost. Of course, the scope and effort for such a transformation is quite huge and there are many tasks involved for the complete application to run on a completely different platform.

The path towards cloud-native applications is being adopted by more and more companies. For green-field applications this is a natural choice to architect your applications in a way so that they can be developed, deployed and operated in a cloud environment. This of course could mean on-prem, hybrid or public cloud. When thinking about your heritage applications and your desire to modernize those, a cloud migration isn’t typically an easy thing to do.

As a business technology architect helping clients transform their applications, I sometimes feel more like a software archeologist. It is very interesting to see how heterogeneous the technology landscape is and how diverse it is being used at customers of all size and industry sector. But, there is one common question that we see throughout our engagements: “How can we transform this heritage to a future state?” and “Can you help us keep what’s important, but make it easier to manage?

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I finally managed to deploy and run a custom application in SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). The difficult part for me was not setting up the environment per se, but to solve all the source dependencies and unknowns around the platform’s prerequisites. I found it really challenging to actually find the relevant information on the web, so I decided to write this post to list a set of issues I ran into and how I managed to solve them.

<img src="https://cdn.kimpel.com/WP_20160224_18_22_20_Rich_LI-168x300.jpg" alt="WP_20160224_18_22_20_Rich_LI"> Banking Briefing I just recently did a talk on application modernization for attendees from the financial services industry. The discussions we had afterwards were quite interesting and I enjoyed the sharing of ideas and potential solutions. Interestingly enough, on my flight back home, I read an article in one of the biggest German newspapers. The title of this article was (more or less) “The next break-down is about to happen soon”.