Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z now available for developers

These new Ansible modules join other recent additions to DevOps tooling for z/OS on IBM Z.

The entire IBM Z platform is rapidly evolving, with major advances coming across Linux on Z, LinuxONE, and z/OS. Hybrid multicloud demands consistency and agility from all of these platforms. Validation of dozens of open source projects for Linux on Z and LinuxONE has been a boon for developers and DevOps practitioners alike.

That’s why I’m pleased to announce the availability of the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, which includes the z/OS Core Collection and is now available on Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Automation Hub as a supported, certified collection by Red Hat.

This is an important step forward in enabling z/OS to participate in an Ansible-based enterprise automation strategy in exactly the same way that the rest of your environments do. Leveraging Ansible to automate z/OS brings consistency across the hybrid multicloud environments and enables z/OS to transparently participate in your infrastructure.

These new Ansible modules join other considerable developments in DevOps tooling support for z/OS on IBM Z systems. You can now use modern IDEs like Visual Studio Code and the Eclipse Che platform, employing familiar tools to code in COBOL and PL1 for IBM z/OS. IBM Dependency Based Build (DBB) enables building z/OS source code files with Jenkins and Git, and can be staged on generic artifact repositories like Artifactory or Nexus for deploying as part of a standard CI/CD pipeline. For rapid integration of Linux-based software and workloads in support of z/OS applications, check out the z/OS Container Extensions (zCX), which support Docker containerized workloads directly on z/OS.

All of these DevOps tools that are now available on IBM Z more closely align development pipelines with those being used throughout an organization. IBM Distinguished Engineer Rosalind Radcliffe described application modernization efforts on IBM Z, saying “development from a pipeline perspective, the CI/CD coordinator, the SCM deployment tool, is identical whether or not I’m doing Java, COBOL, Node, C#. It doesn’t matter.”

When you also add Red Hat OpenShift, which was recently made available for Linux on IBM Z, having Ansible-based provisioning on z/OS offers great value to your organization. It provides IBM Z users the ability to seamlessly unite workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use platform, regardless of operating system.

Looking beyond your IBM Z environments, you may already be using a cloud-based deployment managed by Ansible. In a hybrid infrastructure that includes IBM Z, Ansible can manage your traditional cloud-based workloads, as well as your workloads on IBM Z, furthering the goal to build smart, build secure.

Ready to dive in? Try out this IMS provisioning example to get started.

Next steps

To learn more about DevOps on IBM Z, visit the DevOps section of the Mainframe DEV blog to see the latest developments.
Check out the new Z DevOps Talks podcast for lighthearted but deeply technical discussions with key players in the DevOps for IBM Z sphere.
- Their first podcast features Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for DevOps for z Systems at IBM.
- The February 11th episode covers Ansible for z/OS with Kyle Charlet, IBM Distinguished Engineer working on Ansible modules and more.