AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How to Accelerate AWS Cloud Migration with Solace PubSub Solution
By: Sarah Aamir, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By: Cedric Hu, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS
By: Michael Hilmen, Director of Technology, Business Development – SOLACE
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While cloud adoption accelerates, industries such as banking and airlines rely on legacy, on-premises monolithic systems for critical workloads. In fact, 71% of Fortune 500 companies still run mainframes. The key challenge in cloud migration is modernizing these systems without disrupting business continuity. Traditional migration strategies like rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring require time and effort due to the complexity of decoupling decades-old applications. To mitigate risks, enterprise architects are turning to the Strangler Fig pattern combined with a data-first approach for a gradual transition.
This blog explores real-world examples of how Solace’s PubSub+, recognized by IDC as a leader in event-driven solutions, facilitate cloud migrations by facilitating seamless, real-time data movement across hybrid environments.
The Enterprise Migration Challenge & Strangler Fig Pattern
The complexity of legacy enterprise migration to Cloud stems from the intricate web of dependencies in on-premises environments. While helping thousands of enterprises moving to the cloud, customers observe typical challenges.
Legacy monolithic systems take time to transform: Modern enterprises run critical applications on decades-old mainframes, customers like core banking and payments, processing data in batch-oriented workflows. While these systems represent technical debt, their intricate dependencies make modernization a delicate process.
Critical workloads demand continuity and low latency: Passenger Service Systems in airline reservation platforms or banking applications require 99.999% availability. Organizations can’t afford performance degradation or service interruptions during migration.
Cross-Department Dependencies: Business units sharing interconnected systems move at different speeds toward cloud adoption, creating coordination challenges and potential bottlenecks.
The Strangler Fig Pattern: A Strategic Approach
To address these challenges, AWS recommends the Strangler Fig, which enables gradual system modernization while maintaining operational stability. This approach, particularly effective for mainframe modernization, begins with real-time data synchronization between legacy systems and cloud services.
Solace PubSub+ Event Mesh: The Enabler
Solace PubSub+ address the data movement challenge in Strangler Fig pattern. Designed for critical enterprise workloads, it delivers ultra-low latency (measured in milliseconds) and high throughput (handling millions of events per second). With guaranteed message delivery and order preservation, Solace PubSub+ ensures seamless event distribution across large geographic regions, enabling reliable real-time communication for modern hybrid architectures.
One of the core capabilities is Dynamic Message Routing powered by Event Mesh technology. Event Mesh creates an event-driven network of brokers across multiple data centers, cloud platforms, and regions in hybrid cloud environments, such as in retail. This network intelligently routes events based on various “topics,” ensuring seamless and automatic distribution from producers to multiple consumers. Figure 1 shows Solace Dynamic Message Routing with hybrid event mesh
Figure 1: Solace Dynamic Message Routing with hybrid event mesh
“Smart topic” in high performance environment
Solace PubSub+ built to scale and handle even the demanding use cases. For example, when deployed in a major Canadian bank, Solace PubSub+ event mesh efficiently managed volumes of real-time capital market data. With daily messages soaring from 65B to 188B, nearly 2M per second, the system maintained peak performance without any outages or slowdowns.By eliminating event capacity constraints, Solace PubSub+ empowers teams to innovate faster. Data that once took months to access is now available in minutes. For data consumers, the process is seamless: simply connect to the mesh, set your subscription, and start receiving the relevant events instantly. This is made possible by Solace PubSub+ Smart Topics.For instance, an enterprise architect of Example Airline (EA) can define their corporate Solace PubSub+ topic taxonomy like this: flight/[status]/[flightNumber]/[origin]/[destination.
This allows application owned by different business units, to subscribe and consume events in their own way.
- An airport dashboard may only display flight status at JFK:
flight/wheelsUp/*/jfk/> - A website for operation might show all delayed flights:
flight/delayed/> - A mobile app for the pilots may only need events of a certain flight:
- EA Flight #1010:
flight/*/ea1010/>
- EA Flight #1010:
Native AWS integration for seamless hybrid cloud
Solace PubSub+ integration with AWS goes beyond basic connectivity. Out-of-the-box connectors for Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon Kinesis enable seamless interaction between legacy systems and cloud-native services. This native integration allows organizations to leverage AWS services immediately while gradually migrating their existing applications.
Solace PubSub+ event-driven architecture simplifies the complex task of connecting legacy, on-premises systems with cloud-based services. First, deploy Solace PubSub+ brokers across on-premise data centers, and multiple AWS cloud regions. Then, connect the brokers to form a hybrid Event Mesh with Dynamic Message Routing (DMR) capabilities. The configuration of the mesh does not require precise knowledge of the location and topology of the data producers and future consumers. Typical data producers, such as a mainframe living on-premises, connect to the mesh first. Next, the consumers and workloads built and deployed on cloud in different migration phases will receive the event in real time seamlessly.
The agility is a key enabler of successful Strangler Fig migration strategies. Using Solace event dashboard, customer can configure all the steps within minutes. Figure 2 shows Solace event mesh with AWS serverless integration.
Figure 2: Solace event mesh with AWS serverless integration
Reliable, and Real Time messaging
Solace PubSub+ guarantees never losing a message or event, making sure that critical data reaches the right place at the right time. Solace PubSub+ can also guarantee order. From the mainframe to the cloud, events flow through change data capture to trigger AWS Lambda functions within milliseconds. Compared to legacy batch processing systems, this speeds up innovation and allows real time use case to be built. A mainframe transaction triggers cloud events through Solace PubSub+, enabling Amazon Fraud Detection to alert customers within seconds. Figure 3 shows On-Prem Real-time data movement use case.
Figure 3: On-Prem Real-time data movement use case
Case Study: United Airlines’ Strangler Fig Migration
United Airlines successfully leveraged the strangler fig pattern to migrate from their legacy IBM mainframe to a modern cloud-native architecture on AWS. Their legacy mainframe runs their critical Passenger Service System, which is typically a “all-in-one” monolithic box.
As described by Rohan Shah, Director of Software Engineering of United Airlines, “Anytime you have to do a change, we have to do a lot of assessment and planning, and lose the opportunity to move fast, plus it’s hard to find people who knows TPF programming”. They decided that “we need a solution that can scale our system as we add new aircraft and new flights” as the company committed to move 100 of its critical workloads to AWS within 5 years. The engineering team decided to “take a drastically different approach from our competitors, by moving one piece at a time and modernizing using Cloud native technologies, that loosely connect all business domain using event-driven architecture”.
Here is link to the EDA Summit presentation that contains the information referenced.
Solace PubSub+ Event Mesh enabled near real-time data to flow between the mainframe and AWS, allowing United to decouple critical systems like their flight reservation system. Solace PubSub+ captured events from the mainframe and routed to AWS, where services like Lambda and Kinesis handled real-time data processing and storage. This gradual migration allowed United Airlines to modernize their infrastructure with minimal risk while maintaining business continuity throughout the process. Until mid-year 2023, United Airline is on track at moving 60 of the 100 workloads. Figure 4 shows Solace Event Driven integration in United Airlines.
Figure 4: Solace Event Driven integration in United Airlines
Conclusion
The combination of Solace PubSub+ and the Strangler Fig pattern offers enterprise architects a proven, low-risk approach to AWS cloud migration. Solace PubSub+ Event Mesh technology, combined with rich native AWS integrations, enables organizations to maintain business continuity while progressively modernizing their architecture. This approach provides a clear path to cloud modernization while maintaining the reliability and performance that enterprises demand as demonstrated by the airline industry example.
For architects and engineers, who would like to try the Solace PubSub+ event mesh, the Solace on AWS workshop is the best starting point to gain hands-on experience and learn how the Solace PubSub+ mesh works in a hybrid on-prem and AWS cloud environment.If you plan to migrate your workloads to AWS using Solace PubSub+ event-driven solution, you can sign up an account on Solace PubSub+ Cloud. For the brokers that need to be deployed on-prem, Solace PubSub+ Event Broker is available on AWS marketplace.
Solace – AWS Partner Spotlight
SOLACE – Solace helps enterprises connect and integrate anything, anywhere, reliably and in real-time, through the power of event-driven architecture. With PubSub+, a next-generation event-driven integration and streaming platform, the company provides a comprehensive way for organizations to stream, integrate and govern events from where they are produced to where they need to be consumed.