Written by Ben Cox and Dan Jast,
Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z provides certified and supported Ansible collections to the Ansible and IBM zSystems communities. Included in the six collections available today is the CICS collection, allowing customers to automate and manage CICS resources and definitions via the CMCI REST API provided by CICS. Users have been using the CICS collection to automate application deployment tasks, perform post-maintenance verification, retrieve data from CICS and more.
We are looking for your feedback! Where should IBM expand the CICS collection to next to enhance the user experience and enable additional use-cases?
In this presentation, Ben Cox (design lead for CICS TS) shows some of the pain points that CICS TS users experience today, and explores some of the ways that we’re looking to solve them:
As Ben shows, what users often experience today, as we refer to as the “as-is” scenario, results in:
- CICS system programmers spend a lot of time translating environment requirements into provisioning those environments.
- The current state of CICS regions is often deemed the source of truth, rather than using configuration as code, which results in environment creep.
- Development methodologies are slowed by the lack of readily available, even self-service provisioned, CICS environments.
By contrast, we’re aiming to transform that experience through collection updates as described in the “to-be” scenarios:
- The first “to-be” scenario allows system programmers to transform their CICS region provisioning processes to Ansible, taking advantage of the more common skill set used by Ansible to produce automation that is accessible and can be integrated into wider business processes.
- The second “to-be” scenario transforms the way in which CICS regions are provisioned by using a declarative specification, allowing a drastic simplification of playbooks and other provisioning automation and promoting self-service provisioning by developers — all within administrator-specified bounds.
As we make these changes to the CICS collection, IBM want your feedback to ensure they work for you, meeting your use cases. Do you agree with what the vision for the “to-be” scenarios and supporting content? Are there new CICS Ansible modules or capabilities your are looking to achieve? Feel free to use the comments section below the blog for feedback, or contact @Ben Cox (ben.cox@uk.ibm.com) directly.
The CICS team are also happy to announce the release of the IBM z/OS CICS collection 1.0.4 to Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Automation Hub. This latest release contains support for the cmci_group module default group. Used in conjunction with ansible-core 2.12 or later, this new capability has the potential to dramatically simplify playbooks that use multiple CMCI modules provided with the CICS collection, as demonstrated in this new sample. Make sure to upgrade to the latest IBM z/OS CICS collection 1.0.4 to take advantage of these new features, and see the whole list of changes in this new version available here.
Additional Resources