Introduction to COBOL on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Microsoft Azure is a flexible cloud-computing environment for running applications. You develop your application on-premises using the Microsoft Azure compute emulator (which is Microsoft's local simulation of running your application on Microsoft Azure) and then deploy and run the application on Microsoft Azure. The Microsoft Microsoft Azure platform provides a group of cloud technologies each providing a set of services to application developers, such as the following fundamental components:

Micro Focus Visual COBOL provides COBOL-specific functionality within Visual Studio, enabling you to build COBOL applications for Microsoft Azure. It provides:

Before creating your COBOL cloud service, you need to decide on the structure of the solution, its projects and its web and worker roles. For example, you might want to provide a new user interface as part of the web role. You might want to retain some existing COBOL business logic, and use a worker role to communicate with the business logic. You also need to decide how to handle your data, as blobs or table storage, and whether you can use queues. Another preparatory task is to migrate any native-only COBOL that you need, since Microsoft Azure services are .NET managed code.

To create the COBOL cloud service, you create a project using the COBOL cloud template and then follow a wizard to choose the worker and web roles you require. This creates a solution, with the appropriate skeleton projects and skeleton web and worker roles. You then populate the projects with your code.

You build the COBOL service and test it locally using the compute emulator, then finally you publish to Microsoft Azure and test there.