Modernizing Telecom Mainframes: How AWS and Astadia Are Powering the Digital Network of the Future

Building on our previous exploration of AWS Mainframe Modernization for the telecommunications industry, we now turn our focus to a powerful partnership that’s revolutionizing the modernization journey for telcos. In this blog post, we delve into how AWS and Astadia, an Amdocs Company, are joining forces to provide a comprehensive, automated solution for mainframe modernization tailored specifically to the unique needs of telecom providers.

While legacy mainframe systems have served the telecommunications industry reliably for decades, they now present significant barriers to innovation in the rapidly evolving 5G landscape. The combined strengths of AWS’s cloud infrastructure and Astadia’s automated refactoring capabilities offer telecommunications companies a proven pathway to overcome these challenges, enabling them to transform their mission-critical applications while preserving essential business logic.

For telecom companies facing pressure to evolve rapidly, automated refactoring offers the fastest, lowest-risk route to modernization. Combining Astadia’s GenAI modernization agent with AWS’s comprehensive cloud infrastructure accelerates the transition to agile architectures. AWS’s global infrastructure, elastic scalability, and pay-as-you-go model optimize costs while providing advanced capabilities like HAQM EKS for containerization, HAQM Aurora for high-performance databases, and HAQM Bedrock for AI/ML services. This approach not only migrates critical mainframe workloads but also enables telecommunications companies to reimagine applications for the digital age, leveraging AWS’s proven security and reliability to unlock new possibilities for innovation and customer-centric services.

AWS Partner Network for Mainframe Modernization

AWS offers a highly scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready cloud platform that makes it particularly well-suited for telecom organizations starting their mainframe modernization journey. Companies benefit from AWS’s elastic infrastructure, which can handle high-throughput, mission-critical workloads traditionally run on mainframes, while enabling global availability and robust disaster recovery.

AWS’s comprehensive approach to mainframe modernization is built on multiple differentiators. AWS mainframe modernization service provide automated tools and proven migration patterns. The platform’s global infrastructure ensures consistent performance and reliability crucial for telecom operations. Additionally, AWS’s robust partner network, including specialists like Astadia – An Amdocs company, brings deep mainframe expertise and proven solutions that enhance these core capabilities. These partner solutions operate within a secure, compliant environment and integrate seamlessly with essential AWS services such as HAQM Aurora, HAQM EKS, and AWS CloudFormation, providing telcos with a robust foundation for their modernized applications.

This unified approach helps telecommunications providers accelerate their modernization journey while minimizing risk and maintaining operational continuity. For more detailed information about these capabilities, please refer to our previous blog post on AWS Mainframe Modernization.

Astadia’s Automated Refactoring Approach

Astadia, now part of Amdocs—the leading provider of OSS/BSS solutions in telecom—brings powerful automated refactoring capabilities to AWS customers. This strategic alignment builds upon AWS and Amdocs’ established leadership in telecommunications transformation. Together, they have successfully delivered over 100 cloud implementations for global telecom providers, modernizing critical BSS/OSS systems and enabling digital innovation. Astadia enhances this proven partnership by bringing specialized mainframe modernization capabilities, particularly in automated refactoring and GenAI-powered transformation tools. This innovative approach includes the integration of generative AI (GenAI) in Astadia’s modernization toolkit, further strengthening the combined offering for telecom customers.

Astadia delivers a proven mainframe refactoring solution specifically designed for telecom organizations’ mission-critical, high-volume environments. Their solution enables end-to-end refactoring with 100% automated code and data conversion. Comprehensive automated testing covers both online transaction processing and batch workloads, ensuring continuity across complex systems.

Figure 1 – Astadia FastTrack process

Each project follows Astadia’s FastTrack Migration Factory and Methodology through four distinct phases:

1. Factory Certification: Completeness and syntactical correctness
2. Factory Exit: Isolated functional correctness
3. System Integration Test: Integrated functional correctness
4. User Acceptance Test: Overall functional and non-functional correctness

FastTrack builds on CodeTurn tools for source-to-source translation and DataTurn suite for data conversion, both optimized for AWS environments. Two automation testing tools are used to verify and prove the correctness of the performed code transformation and data conversion: TestMatch for online/MQ interface testing and DataMatch for batch application verification, with seamless integration to AWS services.

Figure 2 – Astadia FastTrack Tools

CodeTurn automatically transforms legacy source code into modern, maintainable code while preserving business logic and functional equivalency. It supports transformations from COBOL to Java, Natural to C#, VSE JCL to PowerShell, and zOS JCL to Bash through configurable language parsers, analyzers, and rule-based convertors. The transformed applications can be deployed on HAQM EC2 instances for traditional workloads or containerized applications running on HAQM EKS or HAQM ECS.

DataTurn automates data migration from mainframe sources (Adabas, CA IDMS, IMS-DB, VSAM) to AWS purpose-built databases like HAQM Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, HAQM RDS for PostgreSQL, or HAQM RDS for Db2. The solution includes automated data transformation and relational normalization for optimal database performance.

TestMatch enables automated OLTP testing through recording live mainframe scenarios and automated replay on refactored applications running on AWS. It supports multiple protocols including 3270 (IBM), 9750 (Siemens), Entire/X, HAQM MQ, and TCP/IP, with test results stored in HAQM S3.

DataMatch provides scriptable database comparison for batch validation, specifically designed for mainframe-to-relational comparisons (IDMS/Adabas to AWS databases), dramatically reducing testing effort in batch processing scenarios. Results can be monitored through HAQM CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray for performance analysis.

Main Characteristics of Astadia’s Transformation Tools

Astadia’s transformation tools combine automation, speed, consistency, and customization capabilities specifically designed for modernizing mission-critical telco workloads on AWS, enabling a secure and efficient mainframe-to-cloud journey.”

Automation & Speed: Astadia provides highly automated code and data conversion, transforming millions of lines of code within hours. The solution includes automated testing for both batch and online systems, ensuring minimal code freeze periods crucial for continuous telco operations. This automated approach allows seamless integration of production changes during the migration process.

Consistency & Customization: The transformation process delivers predictable, repeatable results while being customized for unique telco environments. Tools are specifically adapted to AWS infrastructure requirements, supporting the complex needs of telecommunications systems and enabling continuous integration of production changes.

Telco-Specific Data Migration: The solution securely migrates subscriber data, CDRs, and network configurations to AWS databases, ensuring billing accuracy and regulatory compliance. The architecture is optimized for 5G services such as real-time charging systems, supporting hybrid operations during the migration phase to maintain uninterrupted service delivery.

Mission-Critical Testing: Automated validation focuses on revenue-critical systems, including billing cycles and charging rules. The testing framework covers customer service workflows, provisioning processes, and high-volume transaction processing, helping maintain revenue stream continuity during modernization. This comprehensive approach validates both functional accuracy and performance requirements essential for carrier-grade operations.

Modernization Agent & Code Assistant for Mainframe Modernization

Transformation Intelligence for Next-Gen Applications (TINA) is Astadia’s AI-powered solution that accelerates mainframe application modernization through microservices architecture. Using HAQM Bedrock’s LLM capabilities (AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, and Llama), TINA analyzes legacy code to provide comprehensive codebase insights and automated documentation. It enables developers to transform business logic into microservices-oriented applications aligned with AWS architectural best practices.

TINA can support telecom transformation projects in several stages of the transformation process:

1. Discovery: Enhanced, interactive application discovery
2. Context: Builds detailed documentation of the application and semantic understanding of the business logic
3. Other inputs: Understands external design docs, coding standards docs and APIs
4. Code Generation: Builds API framework for services and populates with business logic from application

The solution helps telecom organizations modernize mission-critical applications while leveraging AWS’s AI/ML capabilities through HAQM Bedrock, enabling faster transformation from monolithic to microservices architecture.

Astadia Solution on AWS

The joint AWS-Astadia reference architecture for telecom mainframe modernization provides a comprehensive, secure, and highly scalable framework designed to meet the unique needs of telecommunications providers. This reference architecture leverages AWS’s advanced services and Astadia’s automated refactoring capabilities to create a robust environment for modernized BSS/OSS applications.

Applications are transformed to run on Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and deployed as Kubernetes pods on HAQM Elastic Kubernetes Service (HAQM EKS), enabling automatic scaling, load balancing, and rolling updates. The architecture utilizes HAQM Aurora for high-performance database operations across multiple AWS Availability Zones, while integrating AWS security and compliance services. HAQM Tranform for mainframe accelerates accelerates mainframe modernization with the power of agentic AI. This cloud-native approach enables telecommunications providers to accelerate 5G service deployment and future network technologies while maintaining operational excellence.

Figure 3 – Astadia refactoring reference architecture for AWS.

The AWS-Astadia reference architecture can be implemented with multiple configurations for security, high availability, and integration capabilities, suiting customer requirements. This flexible framework adapts to each telecommunications provider’s specific operational demands, compliance requirements, and business objectives while maintaining the robustness of the core modernization solution. The solution deploys within the customer’s HAQM Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and can leverage AWS Network Firewall, AWS PrivateLink, and AWS WAF for enhanced security, while AWS Direct Connect and AWS Transit Gateway enable secure integration with existing telecom systems.

For mission-critical telecom operations, the architecture leverages multi-Availability Zone deployments by default, with optional multi-region deployment using HAQM Aurora Global Database for cross-region replication, suiting customer requirements. Security features can include AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption, and HAQM GuardDuty for threat detection. Integration capabilities extend to HAQM MQ for legacy messaging systems and HAQM EventBridge for event-driven architectures, while AWS Step Functions orchestrates the automated refactoring process

Monitoring and observability requirements are addressed through HAQM CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and HAQM Managed Grafana, providing customizable insights into application performance and system health. This flexible architecture ensures that telecom providers can modernize their mainframe applications while maintaining their specific requirements for security, performance, and reliability.

The solution’s adaptable architecture enables telecommunications providers to execute their modernization journey at a pace that aligns with their business objectives and regulatory requirements, while maintaining operational excellence.

Conclusion

The AWS-Astadia solution combines automated refactoring capabilities with AWS’s comprehensive cloud services to revolutionize mainframe modernization for telecommunications providers. Through Astadia’s AWS-powered GenAI solution TINA and advanced transformation tools, coupled with AWS’s carrier-grade infrastructure, telecom organizations can confidently modernize their mission-critical applications. The solution’s automated approach, leveraging HAQM Bedrock, HAQM EKS, and HAQM Aurora, enables rapid transformation while preserving essential business logic and maintaining operational excellence. This partnership delivers a secure, scalable modernization framework that positions telecom providers to embrace 5G innovations, real-time service delivery, and future network technologies. By choosing the AWS-Astadia solution, telecommunications companies gain a proven pathway to cloud-native architecture that supports their digital transformation goals while ensuring business continuity throughout the modernization journey.