Many enterprises and, as many of us learned during the COVID-19 outbreak, governments, rely on mainframes to do the bulk of their data-driven work and the modern mainframe is very good at what it does. But what if you’re looking to modernize your platform and bring in the DevOps methodologies, tooling, and practice into your organization?

Today, there is an entire product line of mainframes that exclusively run Linux (RHEL, SLES, or Ubuntu). With Linux, you get access to the vast ecosystem of open source software that’s already been ported to the mainframe architecture (s390x), with more being ported every month.

If your organization is using z/OS, the Open Mainframe Project has a series of open source projects targeted specifically at the mainframe and improving usability. Zowe, for instance, helps create a consolidated API for accessing resources and workload on your system and Feilong is a z/VM connector that allows you to manage your virtual machines with familiar open source tooling like OpenStack. There are even connectors for Jenkins that allow you to integrate CI/CD pipelines with your workloads.

In this talk I’ll explore all of this in more to show you how an automated, modern environment can thrive on today’s mainframe.

Presenters:

Elizabeth Joseph