5 Essential Platform Engineering Use Cases for Application Developers, DevOps Engineers, and SREs

Powered by CA 7 REST APIs

An organization’s success in a competitive and unforgiving market requires the right combination of business foresight, swift execution, and robust technological foundation. Successful organizations are typically driven by three key factors:

• Business agility involves swiftly responding to market changes without delay, regardless of team location, organization, or processes.
• Rapid innovation extends beyond merely adopting new technologies; it’s about creating significant value for customers that can be quickly monetized.
• Superior customer experience focuses on crafting delightful customer experiences while protecting the brand from negative impacts.

Platform engineering is an essential building block that provides the necessary foundation for a business to be agile, innovative, and customer-centric. It is a discipline that focuses on improving the frameworks and systems underlying applications and services. It also aims to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of developers and engineers through self-service dashboards, essential tooling, and improved processes.

Engineers prioritize accessibility and familiarity with services and technologies related to platform engineering use cases, regardless of whether these are linked to public clouds, private clouds, on-premises distributed systems, or even mainframes.

Broadcom’s CA 7 Workload Automation Intelligence has been an integral solution in large organizations for decades. This solution has recently been upgraded with many modern capabilities, including REST APIs, making it a powerful tool for platform engineering use cases.

Following are a few examples of how our customers have incorporated these capabilities into their platform engineering solutions. These popular use cases utilize CA 7 REST APIs and directly benefit Application developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs. Our aim is to inspire you to find new solutions to problems you may encounter in your organizations.

Use Case 1: Jobs as Code

This modern approach to scheduling facilitates change management for deployment jobs by enabling the creation/change of jobs as code, validation of Job Control Language (JCL), and scheduling these jobs through APIs. The jobs-as-code use case is enabled by CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab, Bamboo, Ansible, and others.

Application developers utilize YAML or JSON configuration files to define job specifications, triggers, schedules, and dependencies. These configurations also include host inventories detailing target CA 7 instances and deployment tasks executed via Ansible Playbooks, Python scripts, Chef, Puppet, etc.

Validation scripts — written in Python or another programming language — perform essential checks on the configuration to ensure basic compliance. CA 7 APIs validate critical parameters such as correct job naming and schedule existence. At this stage, organizations can also apply their own naming standards for additional validations.

The scheduling team can review and approve changes during a pull request. The pull request generates artifacts, which are stored in repositories like Artifactory.

Ultimately, the updates are deployed to the designated CA 7 systems as part of the CI/CD pipeline.

The integration with ZOWE API ML enhances the use case by enabling single sign-on and seamless integration with other mainframe products like CA Endevor and JCL Check.

Advantages:

• Developers maintain autonomy in their workflow, while schedulers oversee and govern the process.
• The entire process inherently versions the code, facilitating easy rollbacks when necessary.

Use Case 2: Scheduling Using ServiceNow Forms

This popular use case enhances the existing change management process by extending it to include scheduling. In many organizations, operations or scheduling teams take change management requests from ServiceNow, interpret these requirements, and update CA 7 either through a third-party tool or directly via a batch terminal on the mainframe.

The integration of CA 7 APIs streamlines this process by reducing the number of steps and eliminating manual dependencies.

An application developer completes a configuration form in ServiceNow as part of the change management process. Upon submission, the form undergoes validation through CA 7 REST APIs, which check the content, and additional validations are applied based on organizational standards.

The completed form is then forwarded to the scheduling team for approval. Following their review and final approval, the submission triggers the CA 7 REST APIs, which make the necessary updates in CA 7. This integration not only simplifies the workflow by removing unnecessary steps and people dependency but also enhances accuracy and efficiency in scheduling operations.

Use Case 3: Problem Remediation

When a job fails or abends, it can jeopardize the application’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) and necessitate immediate corrective measures.

Incident Management with ServiceNow

If an incident ticket is generated in ServiceNow or any other open ticketing system, CA 7 REST APIs can perform remedial actions within the ticket. For recurring issues that require consistent responses, the entire process can be automated — tickets can be created and resolved automatically, eliminating the need for manual intervention and potentially enabling self-healing.

Automatic Restart from CI/CD Pipeline

If the issue arises from a failed job that was defined in CA 7 and is part of a CI/CD pipeline, the pipeline can automatically activate CA 7 REST APIs to restart the failed job.

These approaches streamline the remediation process, reducing downtime and enhancing the overall reliability and performance of applications.

Use Case 4: Real-Time Data Analytics

The use cases for real-time data analytics are increasing over time as organizations are becoming more and more agile and nimble primarily to provide a superior customer experience and protect brand reputation in case of a negative situation. For example, bad weather resulting in the cancelation of flights may require rerouting planes, flying more flights on a specific route, and finding empty seats in partner airlines to minimize the damage. It requires gathering data from multiple partners and systems to generate real-time insights. CA 7 APIs can be used to define and run these on-demand applications.

Use Case 5: Test Data Generation/ Data Replication

Data replication is critical for many organizations, serving various purposes from development and testing to analytics. While traditional methods often prevail due to their reliability, there are scenarios where API-driven replication shines, offering efficiency and speed.

Consider an application developer tasked with making updates to a critical application. They must ensure that the current job definitions are accurately captured before proceeding. In this scenario, relying on REST APIs for data replication proves advantageous. Unlike traditional methods that may involve cumbersome processes, including replicating the entire database, API-driven replication provides a streamlined and rapid solution by focusing on the subset of data only related to the application. With a few API calls, the developer can swiftly retrieve the precise state of job definitions, enabling seamless updates and minimizing downtime.

API-driven data replication empowers developers to access critical data swiftly, facilitating agile development practices and enhancing overall productivity.

Wrap Up

The use cases outlined here are only the tip of the iceberg of what CA 7 REST APIs offer to our customers. Just as a handful of ingredients can yield a myriad of recipes, CA 7 REST APIs hold the potential to address a multitude of business challenges in diverse ways.

Once the CA 7 REST API server is deployed and configured, it becomes an invaluable asset accessible to every team — cloud, distributed, or mainframe — within your organization for scheduling, integration, and automation needs. If you haven’t tapped into the power of CA 7 REST APIs yet, now is the time to explore their capabilities firsthand.

Contact us for demonstrations and detailed information on how CA 7 REST APIs can transform your operations and elevate your business.