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: Linus says next release will support Rust, FBI warns scammers are getting hired in deepfake interviews, and 80% of IBM staff stay at home. (more…)
Business transformation and disruption is all about data. But it’s not just about collecting huge amounts of data, it’s what you do with that data and how it can enable you to create powerful insights.
While many people focus on the cloud unicorns, the reality is that industry incumbents have a huge advantage. These businesses have decades of experience which translates into massive amounts of data and business logic. Where do many of these businesses host their most important workloads and data? IBM zSystems—the system that is best known as “the mainframe.”
Today, IBM is announcing its latest IBM zSystem—IBM z16. Two weeks ago, IBM spent time briefing the industry analyst community on the business strategy and technical underpinnings of the IBM z16. We met with a variety of IBM business leaders including executives from the IBM Systems division, Distinguished Engineers and IBM cloud leaders. The most significant updates to the platform are the inclusion of a dedicated on-chip AI accelerator and the addition of quantum-safe cryptography.
It’s important to understand the size of the IBM zSystems ecosystem. The platform is used by 45 of the 50 largest banks in the world, four of the top five airlines and eight of the top 10 insurers, among others. Likewise, the partner ecosystem is huge, ranging from the largest system integrators to small DevOps- and AI-focused technology vendors. Suffice it to say, some of the world’s largest businesses and governments run on IBM zSystems.
In this article, I will briefly cover the five biggest takeaways from the pre-announcement industry analyst briefings.
Many cloud data warehouse and analytics vendors say “Bring me the data.” IBM is flipping the script, because IBM zSystems already houses clients’ most critical customer and operational data. IBM z16 will be shipped with an on-chip integrated accelerator for AI.
Everyone knows that AI creates a competitive advantage, so why should you care about the on-chip AI accelerator? The last mile of deploying machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) models is still a huge challenge. Businesses are investing large amounts of money and skills in developing models; however, latency often kills. The difficulty is that ML/AI models need to be built into applications so that the model can be executed at the point of transaction with virtually no delay. This also must be done at a massive scale! Think about the latency and security concerns if near-real-time banking transactions needed to go from a back-end system to a cloud AI platform to check for fraudulent transactions.
For those of you who have been following the IBM zSystems platform, IBM’s z14 unveiled a pervasive encryption capability. This encrypt-by-default approach without traditional encryption overhead was enabled through an encryption-dedicated chip. Similarly, AI workloads will be performed by the integrated AI accelerator.
Developers and data scientists want to use data, ML and AI tools that they know and trust. AI success requires an open stack of software options, not a walled garden. While IBM has a wide range of AI technologies, including Watson Machine Learning for z/os, IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, just to name a few, an IBM-only approach would be a non-starter for many data scientists.
The IBM z16 AI accelerator supports a wide selection of ML libraries and compilers. Clients can build and train models in a variety of popular frameworks including TensorFlow, SAS, Microsoft CognitiveToolkit (Microsoft CNTK), PyTorch and Keras, along with others.
The system uses ONNX, an open source tool to enable interoperability of ML/AI models to prepare and deploy the model on the dedicated AI accelerator.
What does this mean? You can bring your existing data models to IBM z16. In addition, your teams can use their existing preferred vendors while also working with IBM zSystem’s integrated accelerator chip.
Cybercrime is a multibillion-dollar business. Although fairly routine exploits like phishing remain the number-one money generator for cybercriminals, these gangs and nation-state-sponsored organizations are getting more sophisticated. For example, cybercriminals are investing in AI and ML just like traditional businesses. In some cases, cybercrime syndicate engineering employees believe they’re working for a legitimate company.
What is quantum-safe cryptography? The research is focused on identifying algorithms that are resistant to attacks by both classical and quantum computers.
Why is this a growing area of concern? IBM, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) all offer quantum computing-as-a-service. While quantum computing has massive potential for applications across a wide range of industries including drug discovery, chemical engineering and combating climate change, keep in mind that cybercriminals are looking at this technology to unlock complex cryptography algorithms.
IBM claims that IBM z16 is a “quantum-safe system.” The company uses a variety of different hardware, software and business process approaches to assure data security. For example, the system includes a new crypto express card with quantum-safe APIs to upgrade existing application security. At a firmware level, IBM z16 has a built-in dual signature scheme.
In addition, for a number of years, the IBM zSystems platform has taken a zero-trust approach to security which includes a bring-your-own-key (BYOK) framework. IBM can never access the keys to your encrypted data–and neither can cybercriminals and/or governmental organizations—instead, those encryption keys remain inside your firewall.
What a difference a nine can make! Five nines mean 99.999% availability while four nines (99.99% availability) result in more than 47 minutes of downtime per year.
When I work with C-level executives that have a mainframe within their environment, the role of IBM zSystems is always discussed. In many cases, businesses have explored the possibility of transitioning off of the mainframe, but resilience, predictability and security are the reasons why businesses remain on the platform.
IBM mainframe services are increasingly being offered in the cloud. Most recently, IBM announced IBM Z testing in the cloud. Likewise, IBM’s Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services, a key management approach using a specific security chip module, is enabled by IBM zSystems technology.
However, you shouldn’t expect mainframe-as-a-service. Between latency, security, resilience, governance and compliance, it’s going to be a long time until you migrate and/or send your mainframe workloads to the cloud.
As the author of Hybrid Cloud for Dummies and Cloud for Dummies 2nd Ed. (among other books and articles) I can confidently say that the cloud is not a panacea. The business case for moving many mainframe workloads to the cloud doesn’t exist.
Don’t get me wrong, mobile check deposits, airline ticketing and contactless hotel check-ins are great, but in many cases, they rely on older systems that have not been updated.
A few weeks ago while traveling for work, my flights were delayed for hours. I saw that another flight was leaving within the hour. I was already at the airport and figured I could rebook it via the airline’s app. Of course, it wasn’t that easy—I finally went to the ticketing desk and told the agent that I’d like to book a different flight. The agent then went to work; they spent a long time entering information into their system, talking to a colleague, asking for help and asking me several questions. After about ten minutes my flight was finally rebooked.
This airline has a great app experience when things are running smoothly (so great, in fact, that I prefer to book my travel on the app rather than the computer). However, even a slight disruption caused everything to go off the rails. It’s clear to me that the company still relies on old, broken processes and outdated technology.
Moving AI closer to the data just makes sense. The last mile of AI—moving models into transactions—continues to be a huge challenge. I work with many businesses that have tons of data and do an excellent job retrospectively analyzing that data. However, real-time data-driven decision-making remains a challenge because of latency and the fact that moving data between on-premises and cloud systems raises security and governance risks (in addition to costs).
Quantum-safe security is a growing concern for highly regulated organizations in the banking, insurance and governmental segments. Over the last several years, financial industry CIOs and CISOs/CSOs at large financial services organizations were focused on establishing a zero-trust approach to security. However, as attacks become more sophisticated, security teams are starting to perform risk assessments on their approach to cryptography. The inclusion of quantum-safe cryptography is important for IBM zSystems customers.
Rocket Software has added support for the IBM I platform as part of its relaunch of a DevOps platform that also runs on IBM mainframes.
Chris Wey, president of the data modernization business unit at Rocket Software, said the Rocket DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform will make it possible for organizations that employ both IBM I midrange platforms and mainframes to modernize application development and deployment using a common framework.
Modernization of application development on mainframes has been occurring for some time. A survey of more than 500 U.S. IT professionals conducted by Rocket Software found 44% of respondents employ multiple DevOps tools, but slightly less than a quarter (24%) have a comprehensive DevOps platform in place.
Rocket Software is expanding its DevOps reach to include the IBM I platform because organizations that rely on this platform have the same pressing need as other organizations to more quickly build applications, said Wey.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are still building new applications for what have become venerable IBM platforms. A Rocket Software survey found that while 82% of respondents are migrating workloads to the cloud, only 4% reported they are migrating completely to the cloud. The bulk of most mission-critical applications running on mainframes are online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that require a level of processing capability that still can’t be easily matched using any other platform. There are plenty of instances where certain classes of workloads have been migrated off the mainframe to run on lower-cost platforms. However, there are still many enterprise applications that continue to run faster on mainframes than they could on any other platform.
In most cases, Wey noted, organizations will be deploying and updating applications across hybrid cloud computing environments for years to come. The immediate challenge they face is a lack of DevOps skills among the IT teams that manage IBM I systems and mainframes, he added.
Rocket Software also provides access to a set of application development tools for building modern applications on IBM platforms. Most recently, the company added support for an open source Python software development (SDK) that IBM created for the Python programming language to the Rocket Open AppDev for Z framework for building mainframe applications.
The overarching goal is to make IBM platforms more accessible to a wider range of application developers and DevOps professionals that today mainly work on distributed computing platforms, noted Wey.
One way or another, the divide that has existed between legacy platforms and distributed computing systems is continuing to narrow. Many organizations are trying to lower the total cost of IT by centralizing management of both these classes of systems versus continuing to hire and retain separate IT teams.
The IBM I platform traces its lineage back to AS/400 systems that were first launched in 1988 as an integrated midrange minicomputer rival to VAX/VMS systems from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Fast-forward more than 30 years later and there still are many IBM I platforms running long after VAX/VMS systems have all but disappeared.
Think! Welcome to Big Blue Week here at 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: IBM’s employment practices scrutinized, IBM z/OSaaS breaks cover, and IBM encourages staff back to the office.
First up this week: IBM’s defense in an employment age discrimination lawsuit looks to be shredded. Internal emails “appear to show high-level discussion about paring the ranks of older employees.”
According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, unnamed “top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers … to make room for millennial employees.” On the face of it, they seemed to be doing the polar opposite of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.
Noam Scheiber: Making ‘Dinobabies’ Extinct: IBM’s Push for a Younger Work Force
Top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees … sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.” … Documents made public by a Federal District Court … show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees.
…
The newly unsealed documents, which quote from internal company emails … show top IBM executives specifically emphasizing the need to thin the ranks of older workers and hire more younger ones. [One] email refers to IBM’s “dated maternal workforce,” an apparent allusion to older women, and says: “This is what must change. They really don’t understand social or engagement.”
…
Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, [claimed,] “IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination.” [He] said that some of the language in the emails “is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees” and “does not reflect company practices or policies.”
Yikes, ageism and sexism? Experienced staff are valuable, says MrBanana:
I did some time at IBM [and] remember being invited to a meeting with a new group, headed by a new “thinker,” who had something to present to myself and a colleague. We walked past the foosball table to the meeting room. Naturally the room had no chairs, and was covered in multi-coloured Post-it Notes. Once they had gone through their mood boards and the non-linear presentation of this new idea, I turned to the other old geezer in the room. “Didn’t we look at something like this 8 years ago?”
“Yeah, we worked out that compute power just to run the UI for one session wouldn’t be available for a couple of decades.” The children were somewhat disappointed, and (fortunately) we were never asked back to their romper room.
But experience can be both a blessing and a curse, learned aahortwwy:
I experienced both sides of this in five years at a company in hypergrowth. … I learned so much at that job: … In year 1, I was determined to accomplish X and ignored the skeptical comments of some colleagues who’d been at the company longer than me. I failed and wasted some time. In years 4 and 5, new colleagues were determined to accomplish X and ignored my skeptical comments.
“Mainframe” is not a dirty word. It’s secure, vertically scalable, and it put the VM in VMware. Now, what IBM Wazi did for on-prem LPARs, Wazi aaS promises to extend to hosting z/OS instances.
Mainframes and cloud-native DevOps need not be incompatible. To modernize legacy apps using hybrid cloud instances for dev/test—and even prod—can be a big productivity boost. But isn’t it weird that IBM spun out its mainframe-as-a-service zCloud offering only a few months ago?
Mike Vizard: IBM Shifts Mainframe App Testing to the Cloud
While many workloads over the years have been migrated off mainframes or simply retired, the applications that run on z/OS today are still among the most mission-critical that organizations run. … IBM this week revealed it has added the ability to set up testing environments on the IBM Cloud for z/OS mainframe applications.
…
IBM plans to make IBM Wazi as-a-Service (Wazi aaS) for z/OS generally available in the second half of this year, [which] will enable DevOps teams to self-provision an instance of a z/OS virtual server on a secure private space running on IBM Cloud. … At the same time, it will become easier to modernize mainframe applications by making them more accessible to other applications via a set of secure APIs … using a cloud-native set of DevOps tools that run in a Kubernetes environment.
…
Modernizing mainframe applications is a less complicated endeavor than migrating them. The challenge is that building, deploying, maintaining and securing all the APIs required to do so represents a significant amount of effort.
OK, boomer, why are we talking about 1960s mainframes on devopsy.kinsta.cloud? Here’s ArchieBunker:
Mainframes are different beasts altogether, almost alien when you compare them to PC hardware. You have binaries written for the S/360 system in the 1960s? Good news you can still run them natively without a recompile.
You think virtualization and containers are a hot topic? IBM was running multiple OS instances inside a VM in the 1970s. … The engineering is incredible.
But z/OSaaS? It’s déjà vu time for Beleagured Greybeard:
“Cloud Managed Services for z” AKA “zCloud” has been around for over 10 years. … IBM offloaded it with the Kyndryl spin, so its odd that they now want to re-invent it.
…
If it’s a strategic platform, why didn’t they hold onto it instead of spinning it off to Kyndryl? Sounds like yet more daft leadership decisions.
IBM wants to “keep employees safe” as they return to office work after being fully remote. In practice, this means a vaccine mandate.
Although there are exemptions on medical or religious grounds, IBM has promised to place dissenters on unpaid leave. As you might expect, the policy has a few employees up in arms.
Cassie Werber: How Salesforce, IBM, and HSBC are approaching return to work
When the pandemic hit, and IBM moved 95% of its workforce to fully remote, it was pleasantly surprised to discover no drop in productivity. … Still, they planned to return to offices.
…
The company saw this as a way to keep employees safe. … One example … is its development of the IBM Digital Health Pass as an alternative to vaccine cards or paper vaccine certificates, which they use to make sure all the staff that come into their offices are vaccinated.
…
Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, meanwhile came up with what he called the IBM Work From Home Pledge. [It] included commitments to flexibility, kindness, sensitivity to family, setting boundaries, and acknowledged video fatigue. It concluded with a commitment to “be connected.”
Tricky to “be connected” if you’re not allowed back in the building. Anne D’Innocenzio, Heather Hollingsworth, Tali Arbel, Mae Anderson, Ken Sweet, Matt O’Brien and Dee-Ann Durbin:
IBM software engineer Justin Albano said his company recently notified employees that it would be revoking badge access to workers who aren’t vaccinated or haven’t proved that they are. “We’re not able to enter an IBM office at this time,” said Albano.
…
He said some workers have successfully sought religious exemptions but “my thought process was I shouldn’t have to explain to my company my faith” to get out of a policy that’s “immoral in its foundation.”
What’s the alternative? With a perspective, it’s Chris Haney:
Or, get the vaccine. Protect yourself and the people around you. You people really are detached from reality.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: Marcin Wichary—cc:by; leveled and cropped (ask your parents)
Observability offers deep visibility into the internal state of complex systems in order to quickly identify and troubleshoot performance issues to keep up with customer expectations and business requirements. Observability enables better application performance monitoring (APM). So, how can DevOps teams gain full observability into modern applications?
On Feb. 23, experts from IBM and GitLab will come together at the IBM Automation Insights virtual event to discuss how to effectively observe, manage and maintain applications across platforms and how to improve application performance.
The virtual event has been curated to create interactive sessions, led by DevOps experts who will deep dive on the latest innovations, conduct demos and share approaches that tackle challenges.
IBM Automation Insights features a speaker lineup of distinguished engineers, IT leaders and executives, including:
Attendees will learn how Instana and GitLab can enable DevOps teams to accelerate CI/CD pipelines and how to build applications easily using cloud-native Java applications and microservices locally, with containers, and for OpenShift/Kubernetes.
There will be a cross-platform panel discussion in which attendees will get a chance to interact with the speakers, ask questions on any of the strategies presented and discuss several topics, including cybersecurity, optimization for observability, vulnerability tool proliferation and more.
For more information and to register, please visit the IBM Automation Insights website.
IBM this week revealed it has added the ability to set up testing environments on the IBM Cloud for z/OS mainframe applications.
In addition, on March 15, IBM will make available an IBM Z and cloud modernization stack to make it simpler to modernize mainframe applications by adding application programming interfaces (APIs) using a cloud-native set of DevOps tools that run in a Kubernetes environment.
Tarun Chopra, vice president for the IBM Z Hybrid Cloud, said IBM Z as-a-service on IBM Cloud for development and test eliminates the need to dedicate mainframe capacity to an application testing environment. Instead, mainframe application testing can now occur in the IBM Cloud, he added.
Currently available as a closed experimental today, IBM plans to make IBM Wazi as-a-Service (Wazi aaS) for z/OS generally available in the second half of this year. That offering will enable DevOps teams to self-provision an instance of a z/OS virtual server on a secure private space running on IBM Cloud.
That hybrid approach means application testing no longer disrupts mission-critical applications running in production environments on a mainframe, added Chopra. The overall time required to gain access to a z/OS development and test environments will drop from days or weeks to six minutes or less, he said.
At the same time, it will become easier to modernize mainframe applications by making them more accessible to other applications via a set of secure APIs. Many organizations today increase their technical debt by duplicating functions that already exist within mainframe environments simply because those functions are not easily accessible to developers. The IBM Z and cloud modernization stack makes it simpler to modernize mainframe applications to drive a digital business transformation initiative without increasing the overall technical debt an organization needs to service, noted Chopra.
While many workloads over the years have been migrated off mainframes or simply retired, the applications that run on z/OS today are still among the most mission-critical that organizations run. A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found 71% of respondents said mainframe-based applications are still central to their business strategy. Four out of five respondents also noted they needed to modernize those applications, as well.
Modernizing mainframe applications is a less complicated endeavor than migrating them. The challenge is that building, deploying, maintaining and securing all the APIs required to do so represents a significant amount of effort. IBM said it is committed to simplifying the mainframe app modernization process.
One way or another, mainframe applications are becoming part of the larger distributed computing environment. Most organizations that have invested in mainframe applications continue to run them in on-premises environments because of the unique transaction processing capabilities a mainframe provides. Mainframe applications that have been migrated to the cloud generally run more slowly than they did when running natively on a mainframe. There may still be circumstances where migrating a mainframe application to the cloud makes sense as part of a larger IT strategy. However, like every other application being accessed over a wide area network (WAN) there will always be performance tradeoffs to consider.
Following its spinout from IBM, Kyndryl has allied with Microsoft to increase the scope of IT services it provides on the Azure public cloud.
Stephen Leonard, leader of global alliances and partnerships for Kyndryl, said that as part of this initiative, Kyndryl will be expanding the scope of the services it provides to both organizations building and deploying applications as well as those looking to migrate existing applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Over time, Kyndryl will expand its cloud services to include additional public clouds as part of a larger effort to enable organizations to embrace a hybrid cloud approach to enterprise IT that spans multiple on-premises and cloud computing environments.
In the meantime, as part of the first partnership established by Kyndryl, the two companies are committing to providing services to address data modernization and governance, security and application workloads infused with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The two companies also plan to establish a co-innovation lab. Microsoft is also committing to establishing a Kyndryl University for Microsoft.
Leonard said given the overall shortage of IT expertise, more organizations than ever are relying on external IT services to, for example, accelerate application development. Kyndryl plans to work with those organizations to best evaluate where specific classes of application workloads might best be deployed, he noted.
It’s become increasingly clear that more organizations are attempting to integrate third-party IT services within DevOps workflows. In some cases, that means standardizing on an opinionated DevOps workflow defined by the IT services provider. In other cases, the IT services provider is focused on a specific task such as securely provisioning infrastructure on behalf of developers.
Regardless of the approach, however, DevOps workflows are evolving into a team sport made up of both internal and external IT professionals that are trying to bridge the cultural divide that always exists between different organizations. Which IT services provider organizations ultimately select often has as much to do with how flexible they are from a cultural perspective as much as it does their technical expertise.
For its part, Microsoft is counting on IT services providers such as Kyndryl to increase the total number of workloads running on its cloud. Now that Kyndryl is independent of IBM, it is free to establish partnerships that previously would have been more complex to navigate.
Of course, it’s up to each organization to determine the degree to which they prefer to work with a larger IT services provider versus a smaller rival that may specialize in one specific area or that is simply a better fit for a smaller company. The one thing that is certain is that as IT continues to become more complex, it’s not feasible for organizations to hire all the IT talent they require on a full-time basis. Organizations will need to carefully evaluate when it makes more sense to consume certain IT services as a function provided by someone else versus attempting to hire and retain talent to maintain that service themselves.
IBM announced today that an IBM Cloud Code Engine service that unifies the cloud platforms on which applications are built and deployed is now generally available.
Built on top of a serverless computing platform, IBM Cloud Code Engine is a managed service that unifies access to a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, a container-as-a-service (CaaS) environment and batch workloads, that run on traditional virtual machines, to a single platform.
At the core of that managed service is an instance of Kubernetes running Knative middleware for invoking an open source serverless computing framework, the Istio service mesh and Tekton pipelines for building DevOps workflows.
Jason McGee, CTO and vice president for IBM Cloud Platform, said the goal is to eliminate the artificial constructs that developers are forced to navigate in the cloud today that can each trace their lineage to a different era of software development. The IBM Cloud Code Engine unifies the developer experience in a way that makes it simpler to build and deploy applications on the type of cloud service that best makes sense for a specific application workload, McGee said. Developers no longer need to configure code for a specific type of infrastructure; they can simply describe how they want source code or a container image to behave, and IBM Cloud Code Engine automates deployments accordingly.
The serverless computing framework that IBM Cloud Code Engine is built on also makes it possible for IBM to only charge organizations when code is actually running, versus requiring them to commit to a specific amount of infrastructure to run a set of virtual machines, McGee added. Charges are based on the memory and vCPU consumed and incoming HTTP calls. That approach will, over time, substantially reduce the total cost of cloud computing, said McGee.
It should also accelerate the rate at which applications are migrating to the cloud, added McGee. Today roughly 20% of application workloads run in the cloud. Getting the next 40% of workloads shifted into the cloud will require providing a simplified application developer experience, noted McGee.
The challenge organizations are wrestling with today is that they are deploying a mix of monolithic and microservices-based applications in the cloud that, to varying degrees, rely on batch-oriented and real-time platforms. IBM Cloud Code Engine represents an effort to provide a layer of abstraction over a wide range of cloud services that they can flexibly invoke via an event-driven platform, as required.
The DevOps implications of IBM Cloud Code Engine are potentially profound. DevOps teams today spend an inordinate amount of time provisioning cloud infrastructure on behalf of developers. IBM is now making a case for a platform that automates that process in few seconds. In effect, control over cloud infrastructure will shift even further left to application developers. DevOps teams, in theory, will spend more of their time optimizing cloud environments after an application has been deployed.
It’s not clear to what degree platforms such as IBM Cloud Code Engine might force cloud service providers to consolidate distinct cloud services they provide to developers today based on the type of application being built. However, it’s already apparent that the writing on the wall heralding that consolidation have now been indelibly inscribed.
New and updated DevOps capabilities aim to increase agility for developers
ARMONK, N.Y., March 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a series of new and updated capabilities for developers designed to deliver intelligent application analysis throughout the DevOps pipeline, generally available on March 19.
According to an IBM internal assessment, a bank with $1B in IT spend undergoing a hybrid transformation with integrating mainframe reported 2.5x the value of a single vendor cloud approach1. However, to fully realize that potential value with low risk and high ROI, clients will need DevOps tools that can assist them to help understand application complexity – a key step when planning their cloud transformation journey.
To help clients unlock the value of DevOps across the enterprise, and help reduce risk around application modernization, today IBM is announcing new IBM Wazi Analyze capabilities to help bring IBM Z into the DevOps pipeline, unlocking uniform, enterprise-wide agile delivery processes and standards with transferable skills for non-Z developers.
These new capabilities are included in:
In addition, IBM is also announcing we have completed a licensing agreement with ITP Software Systeme GmbH, Munich (ITP) to enhance DevOps for IBM Z Hybrid Cloud capabilities. This includes IBM’s offerings IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI) for IBM Z V6 and IBM Wazi Developer V1.2 and is expected to provide a strong foundation for our clients’ application modernization and cloud transformation initiatives, accelerating their journey to hybrid cloud. By working with ITP, IBM will introduce advanced application analysis on IBM Z and Red Hat OpenShift, as well as be able to provide on-demand project level analysis as part of a modern DevOps pipeline when and where developers need it.
“We look forward to using the new IBM Wazi Analyze web user interface as part of IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence, said Armin Kramer, Software Engineer at DATEV eG. “With these new capabilities, our developers will gain deeper access to z/OS application analysis – a critical component to enhance productivity when maintaining and developing code in a hybrid cloud environment.”
For more information, please visit: IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence and IBM Wazi Developer
Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.
IBM today extended its effort to enable IT organizations that have mainframes to embrace DevOps best practices by updating the analytics tools it provides.
Tom McPherson, vice president for IBM Z Software, said a version 6.0 update to the suite of IBM application discovery and delivery intelligence (ADDI) for IBM Z tools surfaces more granular insights by leveraging a new version of Wazi Analyze that now analyzes code immediately after a change is made. That capability is critical, because most of the workloads running on a mainframe are highly tuned. Any issue that is likely to occur can usually be traced directly back to the latest software update made to the environment, McPherson said.
Wazi Analyze also can now be deployed as a set of containers, which McPherson said means IT teams can opt to run the analytics application on a platform other than the mainframe.
ADDI also has been updated to improve Assembler support by making it easier to analyze multi-level dynamic assembler macro calls. A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for feeding that data back to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline has also been added.
Finally, IBM revealed it signed a licensing agreement with ITP Software Systeme GmbH, Munich (ITP) to enhance application analytics capabilities. That capability will be added to a future release of DevOps for IBM Z Hybrid Cloud, which includes ADDI and IBM Wazi Developer, to enable organizations to determine how best to modernize legacy monolithic applications as they transition to a microservices-based, cloud-native computing environment.
Naturally, not every monolithic application is going to be converted into a series of microservices. However, McPherson said, it’s clear there is a need for analytics tools that will enable IT teams to more easily determine which elements of an application are better suited to being reconfigured as microservices that could be deployed on, for example, a Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
For the last several years, IBM has been encouraging IT organizations that have mainframes to embrace DevOps best practices as part of a larger effort to position mainframes as another type of distributed computing platform. The overall goal is to lower the total cost of mainframe ownership by reducing the need to rely on specialists to manage mainframe application environments. Each year, more of those specialists retire. IBM wants to make it more feasible for organizations to replace those specialists with IT generalists, like those that typically manage distributed computing environments. At the same time, management of distributed computing environments is becoming more automated, thanks to the rise of DevOps.
Of course, mainframe processes have been highly automated for decades. IT teams managing mainframes may still rely primarily on waterfall-based processes to deploy applications, but the underling infrastructure is designed to scale up and down on demand as application workloads require. Convincing IT teams that, for decades, have employed the same processes to manage mainframes often requires a significant amount of cultural change.
Regardless of motivation, however, the winds of DevOps change are now blowing through mainframe environments just as fiercely as they have through the rest of IT.