Today we are excited to announce a new offering, IBM Wazi for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces (Wazi Workspaces), that ushers in cloud native development on Z. What is cloud native development? According to the CNCF “Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds”. Key attributes of cloud native applications include the ability to run in containerized environments and use DevOps as a fundamental approach for developing and delivering applications.

With Wazi Workspaces, we have taken these principles and applied them to development on Z. Over the last 2 years, we have diligently laid the foundation for bringing cloud native development to Z with our focus on enterprise wide standardization, and our championing of open source adoption for development on Z with support for Git We are now taking it to the next level with Wazi Workspaces, focusing on bringing together all the capabilities that provide the ability to embrace DevOps into one integrated offering optimized for development and test on Red Hat OpenShift on x86 and Cloud, and delivering the code into production on Z.

Developers can now pick from a choice of IDEs including Eclipse, Eclipse Che, and VS Code to develop and deploy applications into a full-fledged containerized z/OS sandbox optimized for Red Hat OpenShift, providing flexibility and removing bottlenecks to development on Z. Wazi Workspaces provides the ability to leverage a standard CI/CD pipeline, and open source tools like Git, any flavor, for true parallel development, Jenkins on-prem or on IBM Cloud, or Microsoft Azure DevOps for orchestration, Artifactory or Nexus as artifact repos for staging deployments, and a plug and play architecture that protects existing investments in tools and technologies. But wait, there’s more, You can also leverage the core z/OS Ansible libraries to access z/OS resources using Ansible For more on our vision here’s a paper published by IDC, which talks about our multi-cloud vision and our strategy to get there.

The focus, with Wazi Workspaces, is platform agnostic enterprise wide standardization on market dominant technologies that speed up development across the entire application lifecycle. Support for containerized development and test on an industry leading platform (Red Hat OpenShift), and DevOps as a core philosophy, ensures that cloud native development is now a reality for the agile enterprise with Z as a first-class participant. For more information watch this presentation by Minaz Merali , read this excellent blog by Danny Mace, VP of IBM Cloud App Platform, and please check out the offering pages.