Ansible for IBM Z - Group home

Can you manage z/OS with Ansible? Yes, you can!

  

Frustrated by a set of processes that slow the development and deployment of your new applications and features in z/OS? Would you like more autonomy to simplify complex, repetitive, and disparate tasks?  Spoiler alert, you can! 

Did you know Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can be used to automate z/OS? Here at IBM, we are proud to announce our first contribution to the Ansible ecosystem, IBM z/OS core collection, which is one of several collections we plan to offer as part of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z.

Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z is part of a platform-wide strategy that we are developing to support a wide variety of IBM Z use cases across all middleware and solutions. This will help enable you to unite workflow orchestration in one easy-to-use platform with:

  • Configuration management
  • Provisioning
  • Application deployment

All this allows you to connect your IBM Z platform into your wider enterprise automation strategy through an industry-leading automation platform.

At this point, you might be wondering why should I be excited about this - well I’m glad you asked! Consider the scenario where teams are automating across the enterprise, but the way that each team approaches automation is different. Over time, this continued separation can create problems and pain for the enterprise such as having to manage potentially disparate and inconsistent automation strategies which results in the need for different automation skills. This is further exasperated with modern day pressures of having to deliver more with less resulting in the increase in complex deployments and complex dependencies.

As you might guess, IBM Z and z/OS aren’t immune to these occurrences so our contributions to the Ansible ecosystem will help ensure consistency with the rest of the enterprise, so IBM Z isn’t different, but just another deployment platform for your automation needs.

In this initial release, we provide sample playbooks, modules, and plug-ins, in the form of Ansible Content Collections that can help accelerate your use of Ansible against z/OS inventories.

We'll start with four z/OS core modules for job and data set management in the IBM z/OS core collection with more to follow:

  • zos_job_submit, zos_job_query, zos_job_output: Use these three modules to manage almost all of your JCL needs on z/OS; we wanted to ensure that you can leverage the existing JCL that you have for automating your systems as well as use dynamic and flexible JCL templates for more advanced JCL automation with Ansible.
  • zos_data_set: This module allows you to create, delete, and manage attributes for your data sets without having to write any JCL. 

You can find the certified and supported versions on Ansible Automation Hub (search:’zos’): https://www.ansible.com/products/automation-hub. Note, a subscription to the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is required to access this supported content.

You can find our open source community versions on Ansible Galaxy: http://galaxy.ansible.com/ibm/ibm_zos_core.

For technical documentation on IBM z/OS core collection, please visit: https://ibm.github.io/z_ansible_collections_doc/index.html.

For additional information on Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z please visit: