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A comment on Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS. Parent comment

Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by posixplz on Monday May 06, 2019 @12:04PM (#19840654)
The authors emphasized in multiple places that moving off COBOL was a first-order project requirement.

I did find it interesting that the original system, and delivered overhaul, both ran Oracle databases. Overall transactional volume is low (500k/day). Perhaps the DoD has significant investments in stored procedures? Or perhaps Aurora is not ready for prime time in AWS Gov Cloud? (It’s no secret that AWS really struggles with keeping feature parity between Gov and commercial.)

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by count on Monday May 06, 2019 @12:18PM (#19840807)
The DoD has a significant investment in Oracle by name. In over a decade working around their systems, I've yet to encounter anything that couldn't be served by a mid-sized PG instance instead. The VAST majority of systems don't even register on 'performance' thresholds - they serve 5-50k users, almost entirely internal, etc. The 'bigness' of the program is its importance, rather than it's actual technical scale.
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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by tantalor on Monday May 06, 2019 @12:07PM (#19840687)
But there seems to be no business purpose justifying that requirement. They spent 30 months writing and refining a COBOL-to-Java transpiler instead.

Maybe the business purpose was to waste time and bill clients?

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by mooreds on Monday May 06, 2019 @12:26PM (#19840909)
Which requirement? Moving off COBOL?

They mentioned numerous times that COBOL work was harder to staff and maintain.

Seems like a good reason to move to me.

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