IBM® Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU) fills in the functionality gaps in UNIX System Services (USS) by providing the underlying runtime to support executing automation tasks on z/OS via shell commands and Python. Many customers are using ZOAU today to build their own scripts and automation for z/OS, or leveraging ZOAU as the foundation of the z/OS Core and the z/OS IMS Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z collections. Whether you are writing Ansible playbooks or custom shell or Python scripts for automating on the platform, IBM Z Open Automation Utilities plays a crucial role in the future of the z/OS automation strategy. 

It is with great excitement that we are announcing the general availability of the new IBM Z Open Automation Utilities version 1.2.0! ZOAU 1.2.0 comes with many important changes such as increasing performance, adding new features, improving upon command output and more. One of the main changes in this new release is the removal of the SDSF dependency on working with certain JES related commands. Now users will be interacting directly with the subsystem, enabling customers without SDSF to leverage the capabilities of ZOAU. Check out the official IBM announcement here. 

Other important updates to highlight in ZOAU 1.2.0 are the performance improvements across many of the utilities by fully reimplementing them in C. In the previous versions of ZOAU, specific utilities has included some features that were written in REXX. As the team transitioned these utilities to be fully backed by C, there were a magnitude of performance improvements in jls, ddls, pjdd, jsub, jcan, opercmd and pcon. Not only are these performance improvements important, but many Cloud applications are written in C, making integration with z/OS much easier for Cloud applications and microservices. 

For a full list of the changes in IBM Z Open Automation Utilities version 1.2.0, check out the "Whats new and noteworthy" section of the ZOAU documentation. With much more planned for upcoming releases of ZOAU, make sure to join the Ansible for IBM Z community to stay up to date! 

As users continue to adopt and use ZOAU, we have built a repository that is accepting contributions from the community. Check out the content available today, and consider contributing one-liners, samples and scripts to the ZOAU repository! 

To download IBM Z Open Automation Utilities, you can obtain the PAX download here in the IBM Enterprise DevOps section. You can also download ZOAU from ShopZ with FMID HAL5120 with optional service and support.