Cobol moves into Amazon's cloud
Summary
Topics
The move, announced on Tuesday, follows Micro Focus's launch in October of support for Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. Azure and EC2 are both cloud services platforms, which let companies run their applications on remote servers — something advocates say can be substantially less expensive than maintaining the servers locally. Another example of a cloud services platform is Google's App Engine.
With Micro Focus's Enterprise Cloud Services, businesses can make their applications available either as private services (accessible only to the company that generated the application) or as public applications (available to the general marketplace).
The service is available on Amazon's US and European availability zones, which are localized regions set up to bring the computing resources closer to the customer's geographic location. Amazon initially offered only US availability zones, but added a European zone in December.
Micro Focus's service uses an enterprise's existing encryption keys for security on both the network and cloud-based storage. The software provider said shifting to the cloud should be considered a cost-cutting measure by businesses to help them deal with the current economic crisis. "To innovate in today's tough economic climate, enterprises must embrace flexibility and cost-effective modernization strategies," said Mark Haynie, Micro Focus's chief technology officer for application modernization, in a statement.
A developer survey by Evans Data this week found fewer than 10 percent of developers worldwide are currently using cloud services, but more than one-quarter said they planned to use cloud services at some point.
Microsoft introduced Windows Azure, the cloud operating system powering the Azure Services Platform, in October.
Talkback Most Recent of 3 Talkback(s)
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First, it's COBOL (all caps)...
And second, what does anything COBOL have to do with this (other than Micro Focus is the last publicly recognized vestige of COBOL)?
Timpraetor16th Jan 2009 -
david.stanfield@...16th Jan 2009 -
Laughable example
First of all, the only USEFUL aspect of the link you provided was demonstrating they got "COBOL" right in the NW story (COmmon Business-Oriented Language).
Secondly, government, whether it be Federal or State, is hardly the bellwether of IT programming language trends (disclaimer: I'm a 24 yr civil servant veteran w/ a BS degree focused on COBOL programming). If anything, they're usually a good indicator of what is passe, outdated, or past its prime. It's simply the nature of the funding and the bureaucracy. In fact, your story highlights the fact that COBOL is so far gone as to make it impossible for California to maintain its own code. Rather than hire back COBOL programmers, the State of California would be best served to re-write those systems in another language, or replace them with an ERP system. Either way, it's safe to say you sure as hell don't want to pour anymore money into a COBOL system unless your main focus is to manage your threadbare systems on a critically small budget. California may be that desperate, but that should NOT be taken as an endorsement of the viability of COBOL in this day and age.
As far as MicroFocus is concerned, they obviously have a HUGE vested interest in keeping COBOL relevant. They've tried their best, but as time has marched on, those who clung to COBOL as the rest moved to other languages are now far behind their peers. MicroFocus will continue to diminish in importance in the IT industry unless they get off the COBOL life raft.
You can keep putting off that conversion of your antiquated and outdated COBOL systems, and keep drinking the IBM Kool Aid that mainframes are still relevant, or you can catch up and evolve like the rest of the IT industry did over the last twenty years.
Don't confuse "education" for "delusion", my friend.
ejhonda19th Jan 2009
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