By this point most enterprises, including those running on legacy infrastructures, are familiar with the benefits of serverless computing:

• Greater scalability
• Faster development
• More efficient deployment
• Lower cost

The benefits of agility and cost reduction are especially relevant in the current macroeconomic environment when customer behavior is changing, end-user needs are difficult to predict, and development teams are under pressure to do more with less.

So serverless is a no-brainer, right?

Not exactly. Serverless might be relatively painless for a new generation of cloud-native software companies that grew up in a world of APIs and microservices, but it creates headaches for the many organizations that still rely heavily on legacy infrastructure.

In particular, enterprises running mainframe CICS programs are likely to encounter frustrating stumbling blocks on the path to launching Functions as a Service (FaaS). This population includes global enterprises that depend on CICS applications to effectively manage high-volume transactional processing requirements – particularly in the banking, financial services, and insurance industries.

These organizations stand to achieve time and cost savings through a modern approach to managing legacy infrastructure, as opposed to launching serverless applications on a brittle foundation. Here are three of the biggest obstacles they face and how to overcome them.

Challenge #1

Middleware that introduces complexity, technical debt, and latency. Many organizations looking to integrate CICS applications into a microservices or serverless architecture rely on middleware (e.g., an ESB or SOA) to access data from the underlying applications. This strategy introduces significant runtime performance challenges and creates what one bank’s chief architect referred to as a “lasagna architecture,” making DevOps impossible.

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