devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: z/OS

  • IBM ‘is Ageist and Sexist’ | IBM Mainframe-aaS | IBM Vaccine Mandate

    IBM ‘is Ageist and Sexist’ | IBM Mainframe-aaS | IBM Vaccine Mandate

    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.

    1. ‘Dinobabies’ and ‘Dated Maternal’ Workforce Woes

    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.”

    Analysis: Not a good look

    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.

    2. IBM Wazi as-a-Service Confusion

    “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.

    Analysis: Mainframe-as-a-service reinvented

    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.

    3. IBM’s Return to Work Plan has Vaccine Mandate

    IBM wants to “keep employees safe” as they return to office work after being fully remote. In practice, this means a vaccine mandate.

    Analysis: IBM Digital Health Pass is divisive to vocal minority

    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.

    The Moral of the Story: Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.


    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)

  • IDC Tech Spotlight: Making Open Source Work for You

    IDC Tech Spotlight: Making Open Source Work for You

    Starting from remarkably humble beginnings over three decades ago, open source software is the story of a better mousetrap that wins over the world. Originally, the intent of open source projects was to create software that system administrators and developers could use without having to pay licensing fees – but it has become much, much more. This IDC Technology Spotlight takes a deeper look at the value proposition associated with using commercially supported open source software in mission-critical environments, like IBM Z.

    To read more, please visit: IDC Tech Spotlight: Making Open Source Work for You: Achieving Optimum Value, Security, and Productivity

  • Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS Forum

    Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS Forum

    Join the Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS forum. A place where you can ask questions about our open source languages and tools and get answers from other mainframe professionals like yourself, as well as members of the Rocket team.

    As a Forum member you can engage your peers, learn how they’re using Rocket Open Source Languages, and share your experiences. You can crowdsource solutions and you’ll also get access to exclusive information and experiences, including invitations to work directly with product teams on future releases and enhancements.

    • Access general installation and use postings
    • Leverage experience of other users
    • Post your own questions

    Join the Forum NOW.

  • The Move Away from Monolithic Application Development

    The Move Away from Monolithic Application Development

    Shifting from monolithic application development

    Businesses need agility to deliver better services, meet changing requirements, and seize new opportunities as they arise. At the heart of many efforts are applications based on modern development strategies and techniques. Specifically, many businesses are moving away from monolithic applications of the past that are hard to modify and take a long time to bring to market.

    Why the shift and why now? Over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on customer experience (CX). As a result, businesses in the most competitive markets like retail, banking, insurance, financial services, and travel/hospitality cannot afford to wait months or years to release new services, applications, or features.

    The bottom line is that software development teams are under pressure to deliver more of everything (new applications, enhanced features, more access options) in shorter time frames. A widely cited past industry study put the issues into perspective. Leading companies routinely perform multiple deployments daily. By comparison, low performers reported deploying only once a month at best. (At the extreme end of the spectrum, companies like Amazon and Google do deployments thousands of times a day.)

    Monolithic application development does not work in this fast-paced environment. A simple change in an existing application, such as incorporating a new dataset, adding new features in a front-end app, or using a different analytics method, requires that the entire application be revised, retested, and redeployed. That all takes time. Lots of time.

    A better approach is to use modern applications development methodologies. In particular, there is a shift underway to using cloud-native architectures based on loosely connected microservices and elements.

    A cloud-native approach is particularly well-suited for modern applications for several reasons. For example, a cloud-native approach helps organizations address the customer experience drivers that require constant updates and new services. Each component of a cloud-native application can be deployed and maintained as a self-contained microservice. If any element of a broad application needs to be updated or changed, only that element needs to be touched. The rest of the conglomerate application remains the same.

    z/OS plays well with cloud-native

    Many industries under the greatest pressure to speed development and deliver ever-more customized, personalized customer experiences use z/OS systems. As noted, these are retail, banking, insurance, financial services, and travel/hospitality. Government also can be added to the list. It is a large user of z/OS systems and is constantly trying to improve access to its services via new or improved web, mobile, chat, social, and phone applications.

    There are two ways to enhance and develop applications for these systems that use modern development methods. One is to make data, applications, and services that run on z/OS systems available as APIs and as microservices to be used by larger cloud-native applications.

    The other method that is gaining more favor is to provide the modern development tools for the z/OS systems themselves. Specifically, modern application development approaches that move away from monolithic architectures need certain essential elements. Many rely on open-source development techniques, workflow automation, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools.

    Bringing such commonly used tools to the z/OS environment helps businesses speed the development of new applications to meet changing demands of their customers. It allows a business to leverage the data and applications on its z/OS systems and create innovative new applications.

    In an age when it is getting harder to find developers with expertise in native z/OS programming, bringing familiar DevOps tools to the z/OS environment offers several benefits. Those who have the native z/OS skills can focus on core applications and leave the tasks like supporting a new front end or enhancing a web interface to others. After all, there are many more developers available with modern development skills.

    Bringing the DevOps tools into the z/OS environment also lets businesses retain all the pluses of those systems. Namely, businesses are assured that the same reliability, superior performance, tightly controlled security, and massive scalability are retained and can be leveraged with integrated with a broader cloud-native application.

     

     

  • Integrating z/OS Systems for Cross-channel Experiences

    Integrating z/OS Systems for Cross-channel Experiences

    Integrating z/OS Systems to Enable a Seamless Cross-channel Customer Experience

    Many industries where customer experience is the critical differentiator run on z/OS systems. That includes retail, financial services, transportation, hospitality, government, and more. As a result, integration of z/OS systems into any customer-oriented application or with front-end applications is essential.

    Just how important is the issue? More than two-thirds of companies now primarily compete based on customer experience.  That’s up from 36% ten years ago. Companies like Jet Blue and The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company have historically been known for their exceptional customer service. And eyewear provider Warby Parker, widely appreciated for its customer experience, is known for a legendary example of above and beyond service when an executive returned a pair of glasses to the home of a customer who had left the glasses on an Acela train ride.

    Beyond multi-channel to omni-channel

    Many businesses offer multiple ways for customers to interact with their company. It is not unusual for a company to support interactions via the web, in-person, mobile, voice, text, and chat. That way, every customer can use their preferred method to ask questions, review account information, check on an order status, get information, search, place orders, and more.

    What differentiates one company from another is when a business offers a seamless cross-channel customer experience. Often called omni-channel, a seamless cross-channel experience is a multi-channel approach to serving customers that offers an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.

    We’ve all experienced the siloed approach that treats each channel separately. You’re doing something online such as placing an order, checking the status of a service request, or inquiring about your account. An issue occurs such as a phone line dropping, your mobile phone’s screen is too small to carry out the task, or you simply want to talk to someone in person. You switch from mobile to Web, or phone to in-store, and there is no connection or carryover between what you have already done and now. You need to reenter information, answer the same questions, and walk through the same steps.

    In contrast, the interaction with a business that delivers a seamless cross-channel experience is much different. An agent on the phone knows you’ve had trouble placing an order online, the in-store representative is expecting you to drop off an item for repair, and when you log into your account online, you are taken to the part of the process you were at on your mobile device.

    Integration is the key

    Omni-channel customer experience seamlessly integrates the different communication channels that businesses use to communicate with customers. Customer demand for a seamless cross-channel experience is pushing businesses to change. The number of companies investing in an omni-channel customer experience has jumped from 20% in 2010 to more than 80% in 2020.

    As a result, z/OS users are racing to adapt to the new realities of the omni-channel customer experience. Users expect that data and applications will be as readily available on mobile devices, the web, or via phones as they are on desktop clients.

    Developing a seamless cross-channel user experience can mean a significant amount of new application coding. What’s needed is a way to easily transform proven applications and system-of-record data using modern APIs to accelerate the delivery of new services and meet changing customer expectations.

    To tightly integrate z/OS systems for such efforts requires the embracement of modern application development methodologies. That includes providing developers with solutions that let them retain the decades of efforts that went into the core applications running on their z/OS systems while building new applications that tap into these systems.

    Businesses must make available to their developers the commonly used open-source development, workflow automation, and CI/CD tools to the z/OS environment to accomplish this. Such a strategy will help businesses speed the development of new applications to meet changing demands of their customers. It allows a business to leverage the data and applications on its z/OS systems and create innovative new applications.

    Developing new customer applications while retaining the core business functions, processes, and data on the z/OS systems ensures that all front-end access makes use of a single source of truth about the customer. There is only one record associated with each customer. Such integration of z/OS systems thus makes it much easier to keep all the channels aligned and lets businesses deliver the prized and highly desired seamless cross-channel customer experience.

  • Discover Rocket Open AppDev for Z

    Discover Rocket Open AppDev for Z

    Give your developers the open software they want through a system that combines an easy user experience with the security and support IBM® Z® customers demand.

    Rocket® Open AppDev for Z helps you bring applications to market faster, at lower cost and with less risk. We make it easier to implement modern application development practices by automating processes while ensuring compliance to organizational standards and business rules.

    Rocket Open AppDev for Z provides:

    • 20 ported open source tools and languages for IBM Z, bundled for the AppDev experience (with more to be added over time)
    • Secure, controlled and easy deployment, with a package management system that also serves as an environment manager
    • World-class 24x7x365 global support

    Rocket Open AppDev for Z is much more than a collection of software ports. Our most recent innovation is a software deployment and management system based on conda and our own Anaconda Team Edition channel server. This system combines the high security that mainframe customers demand with an easy user experience for sysprogs and end users.

    Compliance and security

    Many of the world’s largest banks, insurance companies and government agencies rely on Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS. That’s why it’s essential that we check our deliverables for vulnerabilities and follow proper licensing requirements.

    All of our products are:

    • Continuously kept up to date against the NIST National Vulnerability Database
    • Scanned for both security vulnerabilities and conformance to proper open source licensing prior to release

    Secure and simple delivery, deployment and maintenance

    Rocket Open AppDev for Z is based on the conda package and environment management system. Conda is uniquely suited to the mainframe world, thanks to its two levels of available security, including the most secure file channel option for air-gapped mainframes.

    Dependency-safe
    Conda is aware of dependency and version compatibility, protecting you against dependency and version mismatches and allowing you to run multiple package versions.

    Environment support
    Simple conda environment commands enable you to create, delete, activate and deactivate environments at will.


    Language-agnostic
    Conda features (including conda environments) are all language-agnostic, making Conda the choice for users regardless of whether they’re programming in Python or R, or simply want to download some tools completely independent of any programming language (e.g. Git).

    Secure repositories with guaranteed provenance
    Whether you’re using our secure channel server or your own file channels, our compliance and security system will give your team confidence that you know where your open-source technology is coming from, that it’s authentic and tamper-free and that it’s been scanned, vetted and tested. All of the open source products and packages we provide with Anaconda Team Edition are ported, built and audited by the team here at Rocket Software.

    Support
    Our Open Source Support packages are based on the same world-class, customer-centric principles as our other support offerings. When it comes to open source support, we’re offering support and fixes for open source development tools, as opposed to consultancy or solution engineering services.

     

    Get more information on Rocket Open AppDev for Z.

  • Join the Open Source Languages for z/OS User Forum

    Join the Open Source Languages for z/OS User Forum

    Why join the Rocket Open Source Languages and Tools for z/OS forum? It’s a place where you can ask questions about our open source languages and tools and get answers from other mainframe professionals like yourself, as well as members of the Rocket team.

    As a Forum member, you can engage with your peers, learn how they’re using Rocket Open Source Languages and share your own experiences. You can crowdsource solutions and get access to exclusive information and experiences, including invitations to work directly with product teams on future releases and enhancements.

    Access general installation and use postings
    Leverage experience of other users
    Post your own questions

    Join the Forum NOW!

  • Download Rocket Open Source Languages for z/OS Today!

    Download Rocket Open Source Languages for z/OS Today!

    Empower your developers to use their preferred open source languages. We offer many open source languages and tools—including Git, R and Python—that allow any developer to harness the power of the mainframe without spending months learning new skills.

    Git
    Git is a version control system (VCS) for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. It is primarily used for software development, but it can be used to keep track of changes in any files. The z/OS port of git supports automatic tagging and conversion of text files between ISO8859-1 (ASCII) and IBM-1047 (EBCDIC) character encodings.

    Bash
    Bash is an sh-compatible shell that gives users a command-line interpreter through a traditional interface via text window and a script execution capability. It is the default shell on Linux and Mac OS X.

    Bison
    Bison is a programming utility for creating parsers. It’s commonly used in both build automation and build automation generation, and converts annotated context-free grammar into a C, C++ or Java parser. Bison is used by PHP, Bash, Ruby and many other languages and tools.

    bzip2
    bzip2 is a data compressor for single files (it is not a file archiver). It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best-available techniques of statistical compressors at rates approximately twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression. This version of bzip2 was not written to exploit z Systems architecture; Gzip may work best for these needs.

    cURL
    cURL is an open source tool that can transfer data to and from servers using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP or FILE). This tool can work without user interaction. cURL functionality includes proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer, resume and more.

    Diffutils
    Diffutils is a package of several programs intended to find differences between files. The diff command, for example, shows exact line differences between two files.

    Gzip
    Gzip is a popular data compression/decompression program (our ported tools have been compressed using this utility). This version of Gzip has also been modified to exploit z/OS EDC compression hardware, if present on your system.

    libssh2
    libssh2 is a software library that allows developers to use the SSH-2 network protocol in an easy-to-use, self-contained package. This package only contains LIBSSH2 libraries intended for use by other programs or utilities.

    m4
    M4 is a general-purpose macro processor. Most users require M4 simply as a dependency of Autoconf or Bison, although the language is used in other contexts such as text template re-use, text editing and text-processing applications.

    Make
    Make controls the generation of program executables and other non-source files from the program’s source files. Make allows users to build, install and update packages without knowing the process details.

    Mktemp
    The mktemp utility takes a given filename template and overwrites a portion of it to create a unique filename. Mktemp also manages the creation of temporary files and directories that allow the user to avoid cleaning up files that are not needed permanently.

    OpenSSL
    OpenSSL is a software library used in applications that need to secure communications against eavesdropping or need to ascertain the identity of the party at the other end.

    Pkg-Config
    pkg-Config is a programming tool that assists with compiling applications and libraries. It helps you insert the correct compiler options on the command line without the need for hard-coding values on where to find glib (or other libraries).

    Sed
    sed (stream editor) is a utility for parsing and transforming text. It is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching, or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file.

    sudo
    sudo is a command-line utility that allows admins to delegate authority, giving certain users the ability to run commands as a super-user or as another user, while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.

    Unzip
    UnZip is an extraction utility for archives compressed in .zip format. Unzip is also compatible with PKZIP and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS as well as Info-ZIP’s and supports bzip2 compression methods, as well.

    Vim
    Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient.

    Zip
    Zip is a compression and file packaging/archive utility. Zip puts one or more compressed files into a single ZIP archive, along with information about the files.

    zlib
    zlib is a general-purpose, lossless data compression library providing in-memory compression and decompression functions, including integrity checks of the uncompressed data.

    Download Now
    Read more about Rocket Support for Open Source Tools
    Join the FREE Rocket Open Source Tools Forum

  • Get Support for Rocket Open Source Languages

    Get Support for Rocket Open Source Languages

    Ready to learn more about support options for Rocket open source tools? All Rocket maintenance contracts include new versions, releases, modifications, service packs, access to the Rocket Customer Portal, chat, 24×7 phone support, proactive alerts, tech notes and how-to webinars.

    There are no support tiers—all customers receiving maintenance services get the same premium level of support.

    Get Support for Rocket Open Source Languages