Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Translating legacy COBOL code to a slightly more modern language, and Arm will go public (again) next month. (more…)
Mainframe workloads were on the rise even before the coronavirus pandemic, and transaction-processing mainframes became vital as lockdowns went into effect and every aspect of business and personal life occurred online. Mainframes are reliable, secure, highly available and affordable, and it is essential for organizations to ensure their mainframe can achieve peak agility to enhance profitability and improve customer experience.
There are four areas of focus for DevOps teams who want to improve mainframe agility: teamwork, cloud services, KPIs and automation. Let’s look more closely at each one.
It’s vital that mainframe ops teams work seamlessly with DevOps teams to ensure adoption of best practices in both areas, where practical, and that those best practices are adhered to. No matter how skilled your DevOps team, they must always be open to learning from mainframe professionals, operational and cybersecurity experts.
To truly empower everyone on your team to achieve maximum mainframe agility, mainframe code must translate within the larger, multi-platform DevOps toolchain. If DevOps and mainframe code are not in sync, mainframe code could slow down software development lifecycles. Important processes, such as diagnostics, test execution and source code need to be integrated to enable DevOps teams to achieve better productivity.
Enterprise DevOps is shifting focus away from software development exclusively to encompass surrounding processes within organizations. Successful DevOps teams must be able to work with cybersecurity experts and mainframe ops teams throughout the coding life cycle to ensure that everyone is on the same page and applications are functioning optimally.
Scaling your organization for growth by migrating entirely to the cloud is not necessarily the right choice for everyone. In some cases, moving away from the mainframe’s core systems can be costly and unnecessary.
Cloud-based services don’t have to be eliminated entirely, either. The cloud can and should be used for business processes that could benefit from real-time data updates, easy team collaboration and seamless integration with other software and tools. Mainframes excel at functions that require reliable, secure transactions.
Whatever decision your organization makes, it must be communicated and agreed to at all levels. A customer-centric approach is ideal here, where the needs of the business are considered, but a seamless customer experience is prioritized.
Achievable and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to monitoring your progress as an organization. KPIs for mainframe functionality usually include an availability rate of 99.999%, which roughly translates to downtime of less than 5.6 seconds per year. KPIs also generally measure time windows for batch completions. Software delivery velocity, efficiency and quality should be evaluated, but make sure you’re not prioritizing one of these metrics at the expense of another.
There are more nuanced goals that need to be prioritized, too. Continuous improvements in software delivery are harder to quantify, but no less important. By fostering a collaborative environment where communication is key and teamwork is valued, your organization can create a better product or deliver better services for developers and customers.
Automated testing and AI-enabled processes can solve problems in real-time and free your DevOps teams to focus on larger issues. Mainframe ops teams can save their organizations money by relying on automated processes, which can also reduce personnel costs.
Despite the benefits of automation, mainframe code is often removed from automated processes commonly applied to DevOps toolchains. Javascript, for instance, is one of the most commonly used programming languages due to its platform independence. It’s an essential tool for DevOps developers to enable the smooth configuration and installation of applications.
But as infrastructures grow more complicated and surface areas expand to accommodate more users, operations teams can feel overwhelmed. With the continuous pressure to create new and better software on accelerated timelines, DevOps teams can unwittingly introduce vulnerabilities in Javascript coding as they speed through the software development and delivery pipeline.
Automated mainframe diagnostics and optimization tools are vital to improving both the customer and developer experience. Comprehensive and accurate data presented to mainframe ops teams in real-time can detect vulnerabilities and to find and fix potential issues.
Ultimately, the mainframe is here to stay, with 93% of software experts citing the strength, reliability and scalability of the platform. Mainframes form the backbone of most monetized applications and websites, so it’s no surprise that mainframe agility has become a top focus for many IT departments. No matter how sleek and flashy your application is, if customers have a bad experience at the transactional level of the process, it could mean lost sales.
The energy and excitement in the IBM Z mainframe community during the two years since the announcement of Zowe have not been seen in a generation. By enabling mainframers to work like technologists who work on the cloud, mobile and distributed platforms, Zowe unlocks the power of DevOps for mainframers, ensuring the vitality of the platform for the long-term.
It accomplishes this by opening up the world of enterprise DevOps tools, both familiar and special-purpose ones, for mainframe applications, allowing users to easily create toolchains that include the mainframe. This freedom to leverage any enterprise DevOps tools across the entire deployment pipeline is achieved simply and elegantly.
The Zowe journey began when Broadcom, at the time CA Technologies, along with IBM and Rocket Software realized the challenges they were hearing from customers—IT isolation, need for increased delivery velocity and recruitment and retention problems—were bigger than any single vendor could solve on its own. The challenges of this scale required an ecosystem-wide response.
So the vendors came together with the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project to create the open source framework known as Zowe (as in David Bowie, for the uninitiated). The Zowe community operates transparently and welcomes contributions from all in the form of code, enhancement requests, educational content and shared experiences. A virtual meetup held earlier in the year attracted participants from 47 companies from across the mainframe ecosystem.
Traditionally, mainframe application development and operations have been separate from the rest of the IT organization due to specialized processes, roles and tools designed around the platform. While they have served the mainframe community extraordinarily well over the decades, the world outside has changed with demand for ever-shorter software delivery cycles resulting in the DevOps model.
In short, the tipping point has arrived and the time to normalize is now.
Zowe is a modern interface to the mainframe that extends z/OS-based services and tooling to the greater IT landscape, including DevOps. As a framework, it consists of four main components:
Broadcom is proud to have initially contributed the first three of these components. The first two were created as part of our CA Brightside offering, which won an award for the Most Innovative DevOps solution—yes, a mainframe offering won a DevOps innovation award!
These components provide a modern way of working that supports core DevOps practices such as empowering developers with shift-left testing responsibilities and DevOps engineers with robust automation options.
This article describes the framework’s ability to onboard the mainframe to enterprise DevOps, so developers, systems programmers and others who work with the mainframe can now do so the same way their peers do with other IT platforms (i.e., cloud, mobile, distributed). These shared experiences close the gap between mainframers and others while preserving the core advantages of the platform. Common tools fuel a common language that benefits all, especially when deploying hybrid applications (e.g., web front-end with mainframe back-end).
Through automation and script libraries, Zowe helps reduce the range of mainframe-specific knowledge necessary to be productive, enabling organizations to more easily recruit, onboard and retain the next generation of talent. By using modern DevOps tools and techniques combined with access to “big iron” applications, the next-generation now sees mainframe as an exciting career choice.
Recent milestones achieved by the Zowe community include the launch of the long-term support (LTS) release ensuring the stability and longevity of the framework and a Zowe Conformance program ensuring the interoperability of a growing ecosystem of conformant tools.
The framework drives mainframe DevOps in several ways:
Zowe API Mediation Layer – Discover and Securely Consume
As RESTful APIs become table stakes, the greater the challenge becomes, making those services easily discoverable and consumable in a secure way. The Zowe API Mediation Layer (APIML) addresses this need by exposing mainframe services, ranging from z/OS system level to database/transaction services to tool-based services, through a centralized gateway and catalog.
Conformance of these APIs with the Zowe LTS standard eliminates breaking changes while bringing additional value, including the usability and productivity benefits of single sign-on (SSO).
At Broadcom, we’ve leveraged Zowe to achieve conformance across our product portfolio and have a healthy pipeline of Zowe-conformant products soon to be announced. By spanning the traditional Dev and Ops domains, we’re facilitating true mainframe DevOps adoption—teams can combine their preferred mainframe-native tools with off-platform ones, including ones used by their peers working on other platforms, to optimize speed, quality and productivity.
Zowe CLI – Orchestrate and Automate
For DevOps Engineers and DevOps-savvy self-service developers, CLIs are a “go-to” tool. They use CLIs for a wide range of platforms including AWS and Azure, Git, Kubernetes and so on … why not mainframe? The use of CLIs paves the way for robust, script-based automation, which is a cornerstone of DevOps. The Zowe community already offers some basic scripts, free for anyone to use.
Using a CLI may be new for some, so community members often share tips and tricks to help these users navigate the productivity curve quickly.
Broadcom currently offers a dozen or so CLI extensions to mainframe-native tools, once again spanning the traditional Dev and Ops domains to improve productivity across roles and processes.
Zowe Explorer for VS Code – Visualize and Navigate
Visual Studio Code is exciting for any mainframers editing code, especially developers and sysprogs. While ISPF and Eclipse will remain viable options for the foreseeable future, the extraordinary success of the lightweight VS Code, which is backed by Microsoft, and the rapid emergence of browser-based editors/IDEs expand the range of options. With 11 million users around the globe, VS Code provides an experience users love and a marketplace of 20,000 extensions enabling users to personalize their UX and optimize their workflows.
Zowe Explorer, which streamlines interaction with mainframe data sets, USS files and jobs, is only one of the many VS Code extensions available in the VS Code marketplace for mainframe users (and a successful one with more than 12,000 downloads). Unlike Eclipse extensions, all of the mainframe extensions from Broadcom are free, and many are open-sourced.
In the Queue: SSO/MFA, SDK, Mobile App
The Zowe community has been working diligently on the implementation of SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA), which eliminates the drudgery of constantly logging on to multiple systems.
Also, software development kits (SDKs) are in the works, the goal of which is to make Zowe services (and by extension, the mainframe) easier to use by providing reusable code for common mainframe operations in popular languages and runtime libraries. The beginnings of a Zowe Node.js SDK and Zowe Python SDK already exist.
Finally, a Zowe mobile app to help systems and operations support staff improve system availability is, like the SDK, being incubated by the community.
Decision Time – Zowe Open Path or Closed, Proprietary
Mainframe teams face a choice: Continue with a vendor-controlled model, in which vendors determine which tools you use and how you work or adopt the open path. While the prescriptive (aka opinionated) approach of the former may have been acceptable for a siloed mainframe, the open approach is the foundation of enterprise DevOps.
As an indication of the early success of the open path, we’ve been delighted to learn about many mainframe shops adopting Zowe on their own, with CI/CD integration and code analysis a common entry point.
For those with reservations about open source, consider the prevalence of Git, Visual Studio Code, Jenkins, SonarQube and so on in the DevOps landscape. Microsoft CEO Nadella recently stated, “We’re all-in on open source” and Zowe co-founder IBM recently acquired Red Hat—more shining examples that open source tools are a trusted part of the technology stack.
Change is never easy, which is why no-fee Design Thinking workshops are available to help adopters prioritize the DevOps use cases enabled by Zowe. Because so many see “open” as the least costly, least risky and fastest path to mainframe modernization, familiarity with Zowe is quickly becoming an industry standard. Ask your vendors if they’re joining the Zowe community and ecosystem.
With ongoing commitment from IBM, Rocket and Broadcom and the guidance and support of the Open Mainframe Project, the excitement around will Zowe continue so join the open mainframe movement!
To learn more about Zowe, visit Zowe.org and the community blog site.
IBM has expanded its efforts to bring DevOps best practices to the mainframe by adding automated unit testing capabilities for CICS COBOL programs using Db2 to IBM Developer for z/OS (IDz) V14.2.1. The company is also making an instance of z/OS available within a Docker container that can be deployed on an x86 platform.
Sanjay Chandru, director for IBM Z DevOps, said both capabilities will play a critical role in enabling IT organizations that have invested in mainframe to be much more agile. The Docker x86 capability will enable developers to build and test applications without requiring access to a mainframe, while IBM’s automated unit testing tools provide a much lighter-weight alternative to previous generations of tools, he said.
In addition to automating assertions and pass/fail checks, the automated unit testing capability for IDz makes it possible to invoke the tests from within either the tool itself or as part of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, Chandru said. DevOps teams also can now store tests in a modern source code management application alongside the code being developed, he added.
The IBM unit testing tool can now intercept EXEC CICS and EXEC SQL application calls under CICS to allow data capture during a live run. This recorded data can then be used to create additional tests, including negative tests, in a virtual environment without having CICS because tests are now run as a batch job, Chandru said.
Finally, IBM is also making it possible to export test results in PDF or XML in addition to JUnit and SonarQube formats.
Chandru said interest in applying best DevOps practices in mainframe environments has increased dramatically as organizations embrace digital business transformation initiatives. Almost invariably, projects access applications that run on mainframe environments but still process most of the data within enterprise IT environments, he noted. Many organizations are now developing microservices-based applications that rely on mainframes at their back end, he added.
However, given the rate at which those applications are being developed, legacy approaches to building and deploying mainframe applications are not able to keep pace with the rate of innovation now expected, said Chandru. As a result, IBM is encouraging organizations that have mainframes to shift responsibility for building and deploying applications much further to the left, he said.
Long term, IBM wants to make developing applications for the mainframe “unremarkable” in the sense that tools for building and deploying applications for any platform should work equally well on mainframes, Chandru said, noting that approach will significantly expand the pool of developers that can build applications for the mainframe.
It may be a while before DevOps best practices are employed pervasively across mainframe environments, many of which are steeped in legacy waterfall approaches to application development. However, there are pockets of IT teams within mainframe environments that are starting to appreciate the need to be able to respond to changing requirements more rapidly. The only issue that remains now is to determine just how deeply best DevOps practices on the mainframe will be embraced.