You can use Kubernetes technologies to provision, orchestrate, and manage a wide variety of z/OS-hosted resources, including runtime environments such as IMS Transaction Manager and CICS Transaction Server that support programs written in COBOL and many other programming languages. The most direct way to do that is to use IBM's z/OS Cloud Broker, a fully IBM supported software product, recently enhanced to support the latest Red Hat OpenShift release. This article provides a good explanation I think: https://ibmsystemsmag.com/IBM-Z/07/2019/z-os-cloud-broker
With the z/OS Cloud Broker there are no additional COBOL compiler release level requirements beyond what the particular runtime requires. I believe even the latest release of IMS Transaction Manager, for example, supports programs compiled with Enterprise COBOL 6.3 (the latest COBOL compiler release, introduced in late 2019) but also programs compiled with much, much older compilers.
You may be asking about whether a program compiled with Enterprise COBOL 6.3 (and perhaps also older compilers) can be packaged and run within a Docker or Docker compatible container technology. Today, no, not to my knowledge, but maybe in the future. However, z/OS 2.4 introduced support for running Docker containers within z/OS (the z/OS Container Extensions, or "zCX" for short), so you can run other containerized workloads directly on z/OS, alongside all your z/OS-hosted runtime environments and resources. As an example, you could run a Golang program (Go programming language) in a Docker container directly on z/OS that provides an API that your COBOL program uses. zCX is included with the base z/OS 2.4 operating system and fully IBM supported at no additional charge, and zCX only requires a suitably configured IBM z14 (or higher model) machine.
There are comparable technologies already available that you can use for your COBOL (and also other programming language) programs. Probably the best examples are CICS "bundles," introduced in CICS Transaction Server Version 4.1 for z/OS in 2009 and enhanced in subsequent releases. CICS bundle support is part of the base CICS Transaction Server product, included and fully IBM supported at no additional charge.
I hope this information answers your questions, but please post a follow up message if you'd like more information or clarification.
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Answered by Timotohy F. Sipples on Jan 07, 2020
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