Ansible provides a simple way for orchestrating the configuration and management of IT infrastructure. It is widely used across UNIX and Windows environments.
Last year IBM added support for running Ansible against z/OS. This included the z/OS core collection which allows Ansible playbooks to easily submit z/OS operator and TSO commands, submit JCL, interact with jobs, manipulate data sets and more. In addition to the z/OS core collections there are collections available for IMS, CICS, z/OSMF, etc.
The z/OS collections are easy to use and means that Ansible can be used as a common orchestration mechanism making it easy to deploy hybrid solutions that run partly on z/OS and partly on the cloud.
A wide range of sample playbooks using the z/OS collections are available in the Ansible Z Playbook Repository on GitHub.
Earlier this week I added some MQ for z/OS specific sample playbooks that demonstrated how the z/OS core collection can be used to submit MQSC commands to provision new queues against a queue manager, as well as manage existing queues. These samples could easily be adjusted for other MQ objects such as channels, topics, etc.
Most customers write automation tasks to regularly back up their application structures, perhaps every 15 minutes. This regular task is a perfect fit for Ansible, so I also provided a sample playbook for backing up application structures. This playbook can easily be run repeatedly by creating a schedule in Ansible Tower.
Using Ansible on z/OS really is easy to get going. Once I had the prereqs installed it took less than a morning to get the samples written. So there is no excuse for not having a try! Let me know how you get on with them, by either adding a comment or by contacting me directly at lemingma@uk.ibm.com.