Ansible for IBM Z User Spotlight Series: Jacob Emery
In this series, we shine a light on the people who make the Ansible for IBM Z community thrive. We share the inspiring stories of users who combine experience, skill, and curiosity to shape strategies, influence organizations, and take our tools to new heights.
Getting to know Jacob Emery
Jacob Emery currently serves as the Ansible focal for the IBM Washington Systems Center. Jacob’s work includes collaborating across teams to help drive Ansible for Z adoption, leading workshops and proof-of-concept projects for clients, as well as developing custom Ansible automation to help his team.
Tell us about your career journey so far.
During the IBM Summit Program, I received six months of sales training and six months of Z-specific technical training. I feel so lucky to be part of a company that invests so much in its people.
In my current role, I focus on helping our clients build their Ansible for IBM Z and LinuxONE skills. I also continue to develop automation and grow my own skills in the process.
“Ansible is ubiquitous in the distributed world, it opens up the talent pool and enables newcomers to be helpful sooner.”
Why the focus on Ansible?
I really wanted to help ease the load of my IBM Z & LinuxONE team. But when I joined the IBM Z space, people would say, “Don’t expect to be all that helpful for five years.” That was disheartening.
Long-time mainframe experts are stressed about leaving a huge skills gap when they retire and I think younger people expect to have shorter tenures at any given company. So although newcomers want to be helpful, they’re staring up at this cliff of knowledge and are unsure about how to start climbing it — or whether they want to climb it at all.
This puts pressure on companies to simplify the mainframe learning process. You can use Ansible to lower that learning curve by codifying the knowledge of long-term mainframe experts. Moreover, since Ansible is ubiquitous in the distributed world, it opens up the talent pool and enables newcomers to be helpful sooner.
In my case, choosing to focus on Ansible has helped me alleviate the pressure on my team and reduce the skills gap for those who come after me. Thanks to Ansible, I have been measurably helpful to my team in far less than 5 years!
You currently work with the IBM Washington System Center. What’s it like?
The Washington System Center (WSC) is a group of subject matter experts who have deep knowledge of IBM Z and LinuxONE. Our primary mission is to provide Z-specific expertise to our clients. We support technical sales by giving presentations and briefings, or by setting up and hosting demos and proof-of-concept work, usually for complicated or time-intensive projects. We also create videos, work on special projects, and occasionally support development efforts. We also run Wildfire Workshops. The WSC is a really cool team to be part of.
How did you become the Red Hat Ansible focal for the WSC?
I worked on a project with my mentor, Philip Wilson. He wanted to try OpenShift on IBM Z, but installing the platform was challenging, so he decided to use Ansible to automate the installation. I made it my IBM Summit Program practicum project to help him create that automation.
I fell in love with Ansible during that project. It’s just so powerful. You can touch so many areas of the stack and skill up quickly. Once I had some Ansible skills, I started getting requests to create other custom automations. After completing a few projects, people started asking me about Ansible in general.
Is the WSC doing more with Ansible?
Yes! Last year we began setting up the infrastructure to overhaul our processes through automation. Ansible Automation Platform is key because it helps us share our playbooks across the IBM Z Ecosystem team, which includes teams like the Dallas Independent Software Vendor Center. This is a big change at the WSC, and Ansible is a core part of our effort.
Any specific processes that you’re looking to automate next?
Like many mainframe teams, our z/OS and infrastructure experts are consistently swamped, so our initial use case is to set up a self-service portal for automated z/OS provisioning.
You mentioned Wildfire Workshops. What are those?
Wildfire Workshops are free workshops that the WSC provides to share knowledge about IBM Z and LinuxONE with clients and partners. They’re regularly scheduled and can also be held by client request. They’re very popular.
I hosted the first Ansible for IBM Z Wildfire Workshop in November 2023. I was originally building a hands-on lab, but then a huge wave of interest hit after IBM and Red Hat announced support for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) on IBM Z and LinuxONE. I realized that it was time to share my Ansible knowledge through a Wildfire Workshop.
“Ansible is like the glue of the IT world — it can help you understand countless integration possibilities, and then act to bring diverse systems together.”
Tell us about your Workshop attendee experience.
We build knowledge from the ground up, so if you’re curious about how Ansible, IBM Z, and LinuxOne can work together, this workshop is for you. We’ve helped people in many roles — systems programmers, application developers, z/OS admins, and ops teams, technical managers, site reliability engineers, and even people overseeing the entire IT stack. And beginners are welcome!
We start with the basics: What is Ansible? What is it used for? What’s a playbook, a module, a collection? Why is idempotency important? We then apply these basics to IBM Z with hands-on exercises.
Attendees love the hands-on labs! We provide useful playbooks and some basic building blocks, such as adding a user, creating a user directory entry, generating a user password, and sending that user an email. Attendees can create a data set with a survey form through AAP, where they can select options from a dropdown and multiple choice questions.
At the end of the workshop, attendees get their own instance of Ansible Automation Platform running on IBM Z, and their own instance of z/OS to automate. Mainframe teams can use these instances to understand what’s possible before they start a full project. Along with time, automating real-world processes can take a lot of mental and emotional investment, so to experience what life can be like with a finished project is very valuable. As far as I know, this workshop is unique in delivering this kind of experience.
Overall, attendees learn that they don’t necessarily need to know how to use ISPF panels or a 3270 emulator, or how to submit JCL to create a partitioned data set. They see that they can use Ansible to integrate z/OS operations into larger cross-platform processes. And they realize that newcomers can get up and running quickly on the mainframe, which is critically important.
Any highlights from your recent Workshops?
The ‘light bulb moments’ are always a highlight. When everything starts to click for our attendees, their eyes widen as they begin to realize the possibilities. They often start ideating with their teams right in the workshop!
Another highlight is the buzz in the room that happens every time our attendees work directly with the technology in the hands-on labs. One attendee literally squealed with excitement as they opened the lab and saw the certificate renewal playbooks! They could instantly visualize a future where their lives are simpler. I love getting to show that to people.
I think everyone should learn Ansible, so it’s great when we work with attendees, especially young people, who want to learn and use Ansible to be helpful to their mainframe team. They see ways to have a big impact because Ansible is like the glue of the IT world — it can help you understand countless integration possibilities, and then act to bring diverse systems together. It’s not hard to learn, it’s getting easier, and a little Ansible knowledge goes a long way.
What excites you about the future of Ansible?
It’s exciting to think that more people in the IBM Z space will see the value of Ansible and join the community. Once a thriving community exists, network effects take over.
We see this in the distributed space. Thanks to the open-source community, no one is working on Ansible from scratch. That’s where I think and hope we’re headed. When we reach the point, the entire IBM Z community can become productive faster as more Z automations are contributed as open-source Ansible assets.
“If you codify the knowledge of your experts into Ansible playbooks now, newcomers can more easily continue that mission-critical work for years to come.”
What emerging capabilities have your attention?
The latest version of IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Ansible Lightspeed is mind-blowing! This is the new generative AI capability specifically tuned for Ansible. I’m especially excited for z/OS since there’s a strong use case for faster, easier playbook development for the mainframe.
I’m also excited about the z/VM collection. I’ve done a lot of automation with KVM, but a large percentage of mainframe clients virtualize with z/VM. This previously untouched area for Ansible will be a lot easier.
I’m also looking forward to Event-driven Ansible. It’s very powerful and I can’t wait to see what z/OS integrations emerge. I can imagine integrating MQ with Instana, and Splunk. Qradar, or ServiceNow. There are many great use cases that can happen with Event-driven Ansible that were previously impossible.
In your view, why should clients adopt the Ansible ecosystem for IBM Z or LinuxONE?
The most important message I can convey is that Ansible helps with skills for the mainframe. Adopting Ansible alleviates stress on the mainframe team today and lowers the barrier to entry for future team members. If you codify the knowledge of your experts into Ansible playbooks now, newcomers can more easily continue that mission-critical work for years to come.
If you have questions, or if you’d like to set up a workshop and are a technical salesperson from IBM or are representing a client directly, contact Jacob Emery at jacob.emery@ibm.com.
For general enrollment workshops, visit the Z Council Events Calendar.
This article is part of the Ansible for IBM Z User Spotlight. Read our other installments:
👉 Ansible for IBM Z: User Spotlight Series — Bill Pereira
👉Ansible for IBM Z: User Spotlight Series — Ipek Dedekoy
👉Ansible for IBM Z: User Spotlight Series — Mike Fontanetta
Stay up to date with the Ansible User Spotlight Series and Ansible for IBM Z community
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Here are some additional resources if you are interested in getting started automating with Ansible for z/OS:
A big Thank you to Dan Jast, and Nate Myers for your hard work and contributions to this article.
Special thanks to Brian Le, for his great visual design contributions to this series.
Andreina Dyer is a Senior UX Researcher at IBM. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
