Today, more organizations are embracing DevOps best practices to improve team efficiency and reduce response time. Developers need to respond and scale in pace with demand by accelerating the feedback loop and having more reliable deployments. IT Operations need technology that can provision systems faster, reduce deployment time, and increase accessibility across different development groups. Both teams are looking for ways to modernize applications and IT infrastructure, and embracing DevOps will help them fulfill their needs.
Imagine a world where developers can readily provision and configure z/OS middleware across their DevOps pipeline including Dev, Test, and Staging (pre-production), while adhering to the requirements from Operations. Ansible provides an open approach to automation that can transform an organization's DevOps.
In March 2020, we introduced Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, enabling clients to automate IBM Z applications and IT infrastructure. The content provides automation building blocks that accelerate the automation of z/OS and z/OS-based software. Today, we are announcing the availability of a new Ansible collection for IBM Z users: The IBM Z System Automation collection. The System Automation Ansible collection enables clients to transfer control of a provisioned application to Z System Automation for automated operations on z/OS.
Ansible leverages Z System Automation through its Operations REST API. Z System Automation provides a set of REST APIs that can be used to give access to resources and templates defined in the automation policy. The new REST API added to Z System Automation allows developers to exploit capabilities to remotely operate applications and services controlled by Z System Automation.
The System Automation Ansible collection offers developers the ability to create playbooks for System Automation to provision applications and automation, saving time and resources for development and IT operations. Developers are further enabled to create dynamic resources from a template defined by the current active policy of a Z System Automation environment, allowing the operations team to manage dynamic workloads. Developers can use Ansible playbooks to operate these applications using the new REST API, whereas operators can operate the same applications, if needed, through Z System Automation.
Z System Automation offers a single point of control, through a modern user-friendly UI, for end-to-end automation on IBM Z and distributed platforms. It is a policy-based and goal-driven, high-availability solution to maximize the efficiency and availability of critical systems and applications. The System Automation Ansible collection introduces new capabilities that can benefit current System Automation users.
With this new collection, we can see development and operations teams come together. Ansible allows the teams to break through their traditional silos and work as one team. Throughout the entire development process, from development and testing all the way to staging and production, Ansible centralizes automation by bringing enhanced visibility between the two teams. As a result, everybody is responsible for applications that deliver new features in a production environment.
The IBM Z System Automation collection joins the other collections available for z/OS on Ansible Galaxy such as the IBM z/OS core collection and the IBM z/OS IMS collection. You can find the downloadable content on the Ansible Galaxy. If you would like to read more about Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, click here.
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