IBM Z, or z/OS, plays a critical part in most large enterprise’s ability to process transactions fast and reliably. Large global banks, retailers, insurance companies, all depend on z/OS for its incredibly fast processing. Large enterprises look for ways to enhance the usability of these legacy systems (mainframes) because they are so critical and because there are fewer and fewer people who know how to use and maintain them. As you probably know, DevOps is the category of tooling used by development and operations to develop, test, build and deploy applications. Over the last 10 years or so DevOps software for the z/OS teams has improved to point where the distributed systems teams (who build apps that run on Linux, Windows), are using many of the same tools as the Z team. For example, both can use Git (with a little help from a special Z extension to Git), Jenkins (with some help from special z tools for deploys to z/OS LPARs) Artifactory, Ansible…
What’s new now is that the Z team can join the distributed team on an end-to-end DevOps platform, which is GitLab Ultimate. With a few special adaptations, provided by IBM and GitLab collaborating with IBM, GitLab Ultimate unifies the distributed and Z teams.
The big special something that IBM supplies is Dependency Based Build. IBM® Dependency Based Build (DBB) provides capabilities to build traditional z/OS® applications such as COBOL and PL/I. The goal of DBB is to provide some automation capabilities based on a modern scripting language that can be used on z/OS.
To learn more about this new offering from GitLab and IBM see: https://www.ibm.com/products/gitlab-ultimate/zos
Learn about IBM’s DevOps Acceleration Program for Z teams: https://ibm.github.io/mainframe-downloads/DevOps_Acceleration_Program/devops-acceleration-program.html
***Join us for the webinar today where OneMain Financial talks about their cultural transition to modernize using this platform. ibm.biz/IBM_DevOps_GitLab_Z