Jonas Fitness Sunsets Mainframe Using AWS Mainframe Modernization Automated Refactor

Founded in 1981, Jonas Fitness provides club management software to over 3,000 gyms, health clubs, and wellness centers. As one of the first companies to offer this solution, its founder had to build everything from scratch. Consequently, Jonas Fitness has long relied on a legacy mainframe programmed using Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL).

“The legacy mainframe is the core of our business, but it has significantly aged. It was getting harder to find the right talent to help build and maintain our applications,” says Tony Autin, president of Jonas Fitness. “In addition, our legacy hosting provider was expensive.”

Faced with these mounting challenges, Jonas Fitness initiated a search for a more cost-effective, modern solution. The company explored offerings from various vendors, ultimately discovering that Blu Age, a software vendor that specializes in sunsetting mainframe technologies, resonated best with its needs. Blu Age was later acquired by AWS.

“We engaged AWS Blu Age in a proof of concept that focused on refactoring one mainframe application: our payment gateway,” says Autin. “That project was successful, so we initiated the full modernization of our mainframe.”

From April 2022 to May 2023, Jonas Fitness modernized its mainframe using AWS Mainframe Modernization Automated Refactor with AWS Blu Age. AWS Blu Age powers the automated refactoring pattern within the AWS Mainframe Modernization service, which customers use to migrate, modernize, run, test, and operate mainframe workloads. This service offers prepackaged, fully managed cloud-native environments with preintegrated toolchains. AWS Mainframe Modernization Automated Refactor accelerated the modernization of the applications’ complete software stack, including application code, dependencies, and infrastructure.

During the refactoring process, data was migrated from the company’s legacy data center to the cloud. Business logic coded in COBOL was converted to Java, and IBM Db2 application data and schemas were migrated to a PostgreSQL database with high precision and performance. Additionally, interactive legacy IBM customer information control systems screens were transformed into powerful single-page Angular web applications.

Jonas Fitness’s applications were then completely refactored using equivalent AWS services. For example, security authentication and authorization are now managed by Amazon Cognito, a solution used to implement secure, frictionless customer identity and access management at scale. The company also adopted Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL, a relational database management system, to support its primary PostgreSQL database. “Using an open-source database saves costs, but we also use Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL to gain redundancy, improve performance, and simplify management,” says James Peltier, CTO of Jonas Fitness. “We don’t have to manage underlying servers, which is a major advantage from a maintenance standpoint.”

Over a single weekend in May 2023, Jonas Fitness officially transitioned from the mainframe to AWS. While preparing for the changeover, however, the company had to run two environments at the same time. To manage the costs associated with this setup, Jonas Fitness participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a program that helps accelerate cloud migration and modernization journeys with an outcome-driven methodology.

“Running two environments was a very expensive proposition for us, especially as we prepared to go live,” says Peltier. “AWS MAP helped us mitigate these up-front costs. Without these types of programs, achieving a return on investment is much more difficult.”

Jonas Fitness has reaped significant technical benefits from the transition. By using Java instead of COBOL, the company can now adopt modern software development practices. For example, it now runs applications in Docker containers managed by AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. This shift has enhanced its agility and performance; Jonas Fitness can decouple applications from the main architecture and make changes as needed. Now, the company can optimize its system at the application level, whether it be for speed, responsiveness, or efficiency.

The cloud architecture has also reduced Jonas Fitness’s technical debt. The company no longer needs to run the entire mainframe 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, nor does it need to spend time on management or maintenance. Instead, it can scale up or down based on demand. With this combination of benefits, Jonas Fitness has reduced costs by 90 percent. “Running our mainframe on AWS is 10 times less expensive than what it used to cost,” says Autin. “We typically target a 30 percent return on investment, but this project yielded over 100 percent in less than 1 year—which is massively significant for our business.”