DevOps Dozen Award Winner: CA Endevor Bridge for Git
You may have seen that the CA Endevor Bridge for Git was recently honored as a winner of the “Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution” by the DevOps Dozen. I want to take a moment and briefly go over what the Bridge for Git does, who it benefits, and why it is a compelling solution for many organizations.
Enabling a Git-based workflow
Bridge for Git allows you to synchronize a CA Endevor® inventory location with an enterprise Git repository. This means that whether your shop uses GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps Server, you can synchronize your desired applications from Endevor to a repo in one of those Git servers.
Your developers can then access the synchronized repo, clone it locally, and begin working on the particular element(s) for a given task in the integrated development environment (IDE) of their choice. In the IDE, the developers can then take advantage of extensions that further ease the development process.
One of the most popular IDEs, Visual Studio Code, has an entire marketplace of extensions. Broadcom offers a package called Code4z that provides support for mainframe development specifically. A plug-in for Zowe CLI also provides users of Bridge for Git with the ability to run builds of their changes in Endevor from their command line. Alternatively, the CA Endevor Team Build (a component packaged with Bridge for Git) allows developers to be completely Git-native and build their changes off the mainframe.
“What about concurrent development directly in Endevor on the mainframe?” you may ask.
Bridge for Git has two synchronization options from Endevor to Git that we recommend administrators run in parallel. The first is an interval-based synchronization that you configure in the application. This means that the repositories will be periodically updated with any changes from Endevor at the Git server level. A developer, following Git best practices, would regularly pull any updates from the server to ensure their local clone is up-to-date.
In addition, you can set up the Mainframe Webhook Server to handle event-based (asynchronous) synchronization for Bridge for Git. Each time an event occurs on Endevor, such as an update to an element, that action will trigger an update to the synchronized repository as well.
For Git to Endevor synchronization, when a developer commits their changes and opens a pull or merge request in the enterprise Git server, the team reviews the changes and then merges the changes to the main branch of the synchronized repository. This merge action prompts the changes to be propagated to Endevor.
Freedom of choice for developers of all backgrounds
Central to development of Bridge for Git was the desire to enable choice, rather than force a change, for the new generation of developers coming to work alongside experienced mainframe developers. For someone well-versed in Git from their computer science education or from experience in the distributed world, using ISPF can seem daunting and perhaps even unattractive for daily work.
Providing access to the mainframe applications in a Git repository provides easier onboarding and support right off the bat. Most importantly, anyone experienced or used to working in ISPF can continue to do so with the assurance that their changes are always in sync. Throughout the development process, a team using Bridge for Git also gets an additional level of review for changes in the enterprise Git server itself, in the form of merge or pull requests.
Why it is a compelling solution
More and more organizations seek to modernize their software development practices and take advantage of modern tooling. Moreover, such organizations grapple with a skills gap when it comes to bringing in new developers to the mainframe. Just as critical as it is to streamline onboarding and provide familiar tools to newcomers, existing workflows need to be maintained for the experienced mainframe developers.
CA Endevor Bridge for Git provides a link between the existing software development lifecycle in Endevor and modern development in Git. Developers who are new to the mainframe can access and work with applications in a development environment that is already familiar to them. Those that are comfortable in ISPF can continue working as they always have. Critically, no matter where a developer chooses to work, they can work with the assurance that their changes will be synchronized with those of their colleagues and in Endevor.
See Robert Giesting’s article CA SYSVIEW Performance Management: Crossing the Threshold to Modern DevOps Processes for an example of how CA Endevor Bridge for Git fits into the development process and pipelines of the CA Sysview team.
For a general overview, see the Bridge for Git white paper.
