Rehosting EBCDIC applications on ASCII environments for mainframe migrations - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Rehosting EBCDIC applications on ASCII environments for mainframe migrations

Peter West, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

October 2022 (document history)

As part of your mainframe migration, it’s critical to understand the challenges that you can face when moving an EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) application to an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or (ANSI) American National Standards Institute environment in the AWS Cloud. The challenges arise from the fact that mainframe applications use the EBCDIC character set, while Windows, Unix, and Linux environments use the ASCII character set. This guide analyzes these challenges and helps you weigh the pros and cons of keeping your mainframe applications in EBCDIC or migrating them to ASCII. The guide divides the challenges into the following categories:

  • Data migration challenges

  • Application migration challenges

  • Physical environment challenges