What We Learned in 2021

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Theropod’s mission is to provide its readers with the value of IBM Z while presenting interesting content on how the latest technologies can be used. We are interested in articles from anyone who is also focused on helping people make the most of the IBM Z platform. Over the course of 2021, we have had several authors handling diverse topics, all aimed to helping readers get the most out of the platform. As the year ends, we asked our authors to provide their perspective on a topic that has been a major focus of 2021: modernization.

Here are their responses:

Joe Bostian

Why do we need to modernize a state-of-the-art computing and transaction processing platform like IBM Z? By many measures, ours is clearly the best environment for enterprise workloads, so why are we worried about being “modern”? Simply put, our platform doesn’t play well enough in the evolving compute paradigms that our clients rely on. For better and worse, the conversation over how to describe, deploy, and even value compute resources takes place entirely in the open source arena. The days of proprietary computing solutions that get adopted by large communities of users are long gone. We need to understand the tool chains, frameworks, workflows, and other consumable interfaces our clients use, and plug IBM Z into them. Open source should be seen as the front end to our world class platform rather than a thin veneer to interfaces we created in the 1970’s. There are some real opportunities to leverage the inherent strengths of IBM Z to create solutions for some highly visible and dangerous open source weaknesses. If we meet our clients where they live, the rest will follow.

Frank J. De Gilio

Whenever we discuss modernization, it often revolves around technology. The focus is on how to take advantage of such a technology. While this is important and work must be done to adapt a technology to a specific business process, people often overlook the cultural impact of such changes. Often the modernized implementation replaces one that has been in place for years, if not decades. Every person who has attempted to modernize a working environment has heard, “Why fix it if it is already working?” People are resistant to change. This is especially important in the IBM Z world where a person’s livelihood can be affected by mistakes. Providing new ways of doing things often means someone else’s way of doing things is abandoned. People will cling to old processes, and often have little understanding of why they feel the old way is better than the new one. If a team is going to start building a modernization effort, they should focus on the cultural shift such a solution will create and work on that as well as the function. Getting people involved in the activity is often the best way to start. Anyone that is part of an activity has more interest in making it succeed. “Our” idea is always easier to sell than “your” idea.

mike fulton

The term modernization is interesting. At any given time, there will be people talking about the new, modern way to do things. Personally, I have been on a modernization kick at IBM for the last 32 years, and I don’t expect to stop anytime soon. One should never be complacent with how things are. There are always ways to improve. A better mousetrap can always be found. On the IT side of the house, automation falls into the same camp for me. How can we eliminate more moving parts? How can we simplify the process? In the last few years, and especially 2021, I have focused on: What Z specific things are we doing that can be done just as well using common technology? Let’s eliminate things that are different for no good reason. Keep what makes z/OS super-cool: Sysplex, VSAM, secure containers, … But say goodbye to “we have always done it that way” tech and embrace Git, Ansible, and Python. Let’s make our lives easier.

Michael Gildein

Throughout this past year, the increasing trend of cybersecurity concerns, attacks, compromises, and impacts further exemplifies that technology introduces both significant opportunities and risk. As practiced by enterprise grade software providers, security, privacy, and quality need to be a focus throughout the entire software development lifecycle. This especially holds true for open-source software which is more often being leveraged, utilized, and incorporated into products and infrastructure. While many consider open-source inclusion and/or increasing automation to solely introduce risk and unknowns, there is a greater opportunity to be gained when used in a considerate and strategic way. Following best practices, modern tooling and automation from trusted sources can be employed to provide technological and business value, even make applications, systems, and infrastructure more secure. In the next year, we expect a concerted focus on secure principles and practices, acceleration of modernization, and automation to increase security postures and traceability while delivering high business value.

Anthony Giorgio

2021 has been quite an interesting year for IBM Z. I think one of the most significant changes is the increasing popularity of z/OS Container Extensions (zCX). This new component has allowed customers to create new business cases and value propositions for the platform that simply weren’t possible before. Being able to run Linux applications within z/OS and tightly couple them to existing mainframe workloads can be a big win for performance and functionality. For example, running a container with data analytics software that connects to a DB2 instance can get a faster response due to the network traffic remaining within the LPAR. This allows for more complex analysis to be performed on the data in real time. In addition, workloads run in zCX are zIIP-eligible, allowing them to be very cost-effective. For 2022, I hope to see application vendors creating containers that are specifically designed for zCX.

Mike Koester

This past year, I was asked to look at how we could modernize and automate some of the tasks within my organization. The first thing I asked was the “WHY”. I could have taken the approach of “I had to learn the processes used to accomplish these tasks for the past forty years, so the new hires should just have to learn them too”. Forty years ago, I hired into IBM, and it is the only company I have known. In today’s work environment, you are lucky if you can get five years of service before an employee leaves for another company. So, the answer to the “WHY” is, as the workforce constantly changes, modernization and automation of these tasks into an industry standard is a must to help alleviate the problem of constantly having to train new hires. It shouldn’t be the new hires the ones that have to change their way of thinking, it is us “old timers” that need to change.

Luisa Martinez

2021 was the year where automation took center stage for IBM Z. This year, I saw many companies not just taking automation to the next level, but automating in a way that is consistent with industry standards while helping bridge the Z learning curve. I also saw many people use the flexibility obtained by the combination of IBM Open Enterprise Python for z/OS and the ZOA Utilities Python API. These gave system programmers the granularity and power to be able to automate just about any task on z/OS. In 2021, Ansible became the center of this effort; the glue that holds everything together. Ansible can not only be used to automate existing scripts written in JCL or call z/OSMF workflows, but it is a perfect match to manage new automation written in Python. One of the key benefits I saw for using Ansible, was that it allowed z/OS systems to be managed in the same way many distributed systems are being managed today. This year, I learned that when creating automation, it is important to pay attention to the layers of abstractions. Keeping complex logic in the correct layer is key for easy management, usability, future proofing, and training. While it can be tricky not to feel overwhelmed with all the new functionality and tools that are constantly being released, it is essential to keep evolving and improving. As the new generations of system programmers enter the workforce, we need to find ways to keep reducing the learning curve. As companies continue their automation and modernization journeys in 2022, many will need to tackle the same obstacles, and will run into the same questions. This is why it is important to lean on the community. I hope to see more community collaboration by sharing solutions via open-source, providing feedback, creating guides, giving presentations, and attending community meetings.

2021 is the first full year of the Theropod publication (We started in August of 2020). Each of our authors has tried to create content that would be useful and educational. We appreciate their insights in this article and all the articles they write for us. We look forward to providing even more content in 2022.