Zowe’s Journey to Enterprise Grade

It’s fair to say that the launch of Zowe 1.0 back in February created ripples of excitement throughout the global mainframe community. Much of the buzz amongst developers came with the realisation that Zowe allows them to use the open source tooling they know and love to interact with Z. The reaction has been positive and now, with Zowe at 1.4, thoughts have turned to deployment. And, of course, with deployment comes questions around support, especially when talking about open source solutions.

Broadcom was the first of the Zowe co-founders to announce enterprise grade support at the March edition of SHARE. In addition to 24x7 enterprise class technical support, customers electing Broadcom support (known commercially as CA Brightside) are safe in the knowledge that, first and foremost, they have access to a thoroughly tested and secure distribution of Zowe.

Why is this significant? It’s common knowledge that any solution aimed at the Enterprise must have a comprehensive support policy to allow customers to deploy to production with confidence. A robust support policy is really an enabler for adoption. But no less significant is the signal it sends out to the mainframe community, namely, here is an ecosystem we, as vendors, are prepared to invest in and stand behind. The most successful open source projects are nurtured by a dedicated and knowledgeable community and Zowe is no different in this regard. However, the mainframe environment brings its own standards and the Broadcom support policy is simply a recognition of this reality.

In the case of Zowe, support is complicated by an open source solution made up of different components contributed by different vendors. The community has addressed this in a number of ways:

• by ensuring that it maintains a shared single instance of Zowe with a regular update cycle that provides predictability and seeks to minimize breaking changes to major releases only
• by open, regular and constructive communication amongst all the contributors
• by showing a determination to engage across the whole Zowe stack, rather than succumbing to the easier route of just focusing on self-contributed components

Once you have a framework designed for supportability in place it is vital to focus on the quality of the solution: the higher the quality of your product, the easier it becomes to support. For Zowe, that starts with the use of a collaborative development platform like Github which can be extended by continuous delivery utilities like automated code coverage that provides instant feedback on how effectively your tests are exercising your source code.

It also requires a Conformance program, backed by a certification process, ensuring the community aligns on key principles to deliver a superior end-user experience and interoperability within the various components that make up Zowe. Look out for an announcement on Conformance in the very near future, especially if your organization provides software based on Zowe.

Importantly, it includes the ability to measure the performance of Zowe by tracking key data like memory consumption, CPU and IO. This not only allows customers considering deployment to preempt the impact of running Zowe on their systems but also has a continuous delivery aspect to it by allowing a contributor to immediately understand the impact of their code, on the overall performance of Zowe, as they check it in.

Beyond quality considerations, you need to arm the community with the tools to troubleshoot issues. The release of Zowe 1.4 will include the addition of a script that captures diagnostics data. By running the shell script on your z/OS environment, you receive a set of output files, which contain all relevant diagnostics data necessary to start a troubleshooting process. You can then share this with the Open community or through your support policy, kick starting the resolution process. Beyond the script, Zowe documentation includes a troubleshooting section that breaks down suggested steps by component.

In June of this year, the Zowe community made supportability one of its top three priorities, alongside security and conformance so it’s gratifying to see how quickly Zowe has truly become an enterprise grade solution.

Learn more about Zowe at this site; read more Zowe blogs here.