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Zowe Makes Mainframe Evergreen

Zowe 1.0 offers a modern interface to interact with the power of z/OS on the mainframe.

Mainframes are, and will continue to be, a bedrock for industries and organizations that run mission-critical applications. In one way or another, all of us are mainframe users. Every time you make an online transaction or make a reservation, for example, you are using a mainframe.

According to IBM, corporations use mainframes for applications that depend on scalability and reliability. They rely on mainframes in order to:

  • Perform large-scale transaction processing (thousands of transactions per second)
  • Support thousands of users and application programs concurrently accessing numerous resources
  • Manage terabytes of information in databases
  • Handle large-bandwidth communication

Often when people hear the word mainframe, though, they think of dinosaurs. It’s true mainframes have aged, and one challenge the mainframe community faces is that they struggle to attract fresh developers who want to use latest and shiniest technologies.

Zowe milestones

Zowe, a Linux Foundation project under the umbrella of Open Mainframe Project is changing all that. Through this project, industry heavyweights including IBM, Rocket Software, and Broadcom came together to modernize mainframes running z/OS.

The Zowe project was announced last year — about six months ago — but it has reached several major milestones. To date, the project, Zowe has seen more than 1,700 downloads of the beta releases, 700+ individuals connect with the project over Slack and mailing lists, and more than 50 committers. And, this week, the Open Mainframe Project announced the release of Zowe 1.0.

In general, 1.0 releases are important for any project as they indicate that the project is ready for production. And, since Zowe already has the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Best Practices Badge, users can rest assured that the project follows best practices and conformance in driving secure software development and governance in open source.

So what’s new in Zowe?

One of the core features of Zowe is a modern interface to interact with the power of z/OS. Zowe 1.0 comes with modern interfaces for web applications for z/OS, and it features a new command line interface and expansion of platform REST API capabilities.

“Much of the past 6 months has been focused on the shift from proprietary to open source development methodology, as well as bringing more and more of the codebase under the project to be able to ship a 100% EPLv2 compatible release,” said John Mertic, Director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project. “Even with that, there has been some early work in the community on building off the platform – one great example comes from Alex Kim at Vicom Infinity, who has build a voice activated smart device for a mainframe administrator to interact with their mainframe via voice commands.”

Additionally, Mertic said, “The community has been focused on building developer documentation and guides, as well as being active on the community Slack channels to provide 1:1 support for those developers trying and testing Zowe. There also are a number of university hackathons and class projects starting to pick up Zowe – one example is the current capstone program for VCU.”

As a result of this community work, Zowe feels similar to a cloud-like environment that most developers and admins are familiar with. Zowe also serves as an integration platform for the next generation of tools for administration, management, and development on z/OS mainframes.

Zowe also offers a vendor-agnostic experience allowing users to mix and match tooling and technologies. It provides interoperability, through the latest web technologies, products, and solutions from multiple vendors, and it allows developers to use the familiar, industry-standard, open source tools to access mainframe resources and services.

Key highlights of Zowe include:

  • Functional extensions, integration between different third-party products and applications
  • Updated docs that define extension points and provide sample applications and tutorials
  • New pre-install scripts to help identify and verify the appropriate prerequisites prior to beginning the Zowe installation process
  • A Zowe API Mediation Layer that provides the foundation for a single point of access for mainframe service REST APIs

A growing community

Thanks to Zowe, the modern avatar of the mainframe is already attracting new users. According to Mertic, “The great part is the interest is both across vendors as well as end-users — showcasing multiple paths for Zowe adoption in the mainframe community.”

Going forward, Mertic said, “The community is looking to move fast, with early plans to have quarterly releases of the full framework. As Zowe is a framework that consists of three primary projects (API Mediation layer, Web UI, and CLI) with their own release cadence to help push innovation faster.”

With these goals in mind, Zowe aims to help change the perception around mainframe and keep the technology evergreen.

If you want to try Zowe 1.0, you can grab the source code and compile it or get a build to integrate it with your products and services.

Swapnil Bhartiya
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