Ansible has a vibrant, inclusive, and highly collaborative community.
Whether you are new to Ansible and the Mainframe or have been using it for a while, I encourage you to get involved in this community. It is an excellent source of knowledge and assistance when working with Ansible.
Understandably, talking about what you are trying to achieve in a public community can be daunting. There may be an answer closer to home. You might already be working with others in your Mainframe teams, but there is another potentially untapped resource: your colleagues in open systems. They can help with playbook logic, source control, integration with other Internal systems and, even more excitingly, hybrid platform playbooks.
I can speak positively about this based on my own Ansible journey.
Nine years ago, I was a Windows Engineer, happy with the platform’s native tools for scripting and automation. I was introduced to Ansible a tool I was initially skeptical about. Why would I want to add a new listener (WinRM) and configure new user permissions? It seemed to be more effort than value in those early days.
What made this easier was having friends who were Linux admins and already happily using Ansible on RHEL and CentOS. These friends inside my company allowed for safe and secure collaboration on this new-to-me tool. As we worked together and brought more Windows SMEs together with more Linux SMEs, we all learned from each other. Both groups picked up skills from one another and built more complete and reliable playbooks as a result.
Building from these early friendships, Ansible started to flourish for our Windows teams. Enabled by our migration to the Ansible Automation Platform, we now have a strong Ansible Community of Practice that enables safe and secure collaboration within the business.
This allows all our SMEs to collaborate on Ansible as a shared tool. Helping our team achieve large-scale success, we are now running over 44 million automation tasks per year.
We welcomed our Mainframe friends into the community, and we are now on track to enable 100 z/OS LPARs this year, with plans to do even more through 2026. Working together bring our experience in Ansible and Mainframes to deliver results highlights include taking a human initiated process with a 30 minute SLA to a full hands-off automation completing in on average of just 60 seconds freeing Mainframe staff to look for the next wins.
A Community especially inside the enterprise can help with new users, technical questions, documentation sharing and helping to show the value of your Ansible automations to the wider business.
To close building and participating in a collaborative Ansible community both within the broader ecosystem and inside your enterprise accelerates learning, fosters cross-platform innovation, and drives large-scale automation success. By engaging with colleagues across mainframe and open systems, sharing expertise, and supporting new users, you can unlock the full value of Ansible automation and deliver measurable business impact.