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Focusing on guidance

Ian J Mitchell

In the IBM Z® DevOps Acceleration Program, our aim has consistently been to provide the very best guidance for adoption of modern DevOps practices for your z/OS® applications, systems, and teams. Now, we have re-titled our homepage to more clearly reflect that, switching from our program name to "IBM Z DevOps Guide".

The IBM Z DevOps Guide will continue to focus on supporting the entire lifecycle for your adoption, from turning motivation and ambition into a plan, to learning the fundamentals, executing the transformation, and maximizing the benefits of using the most current industry-standard working practices and tools.

Generating Software Bill-Of-Material for z/OS applications with IBM Dependency-Based Build

Mathieu Dalbin

Software Bill-Of-Material (SBOM) is becoming a prominent concept in the DevSecOps space, to ensure proper management of the components that make an application. The purpose of the SBOM is to comprehensively document all the components involved in the creation of a given application. To support the creation of SBOM files, the PackageBuildOutputs.groovy script, available in the DBB GitHub repository, has been enhanced to read more...

New focus on working practices

Ian J Mitchell

Successful adoption of DevOps with IBM Z® needs early appreciation of how your working practices should modernize and improve - to recognize this, we restructured the top level navigation.

We now lead a new "Working Practices" section by introducing the branching model as that is the most significant factor in how the roles in your team will adapt their ways of working.

Our "Implementing CI/CD" section now concentrates on the technical guidance to match the practices.

DBB Git Migration-Modeler now generally available!

The DBB Git Migration-Modeler provides a guided approach to plan and migrate a source codebase from MVS™ datasets to z/OS® UNIX System Services folders, and helps to identify and document the boundaries of mainframe applications. This utility can facilitate your z/OS application migration by:

  • performing an assessment to understand the usage and dependencies on include files and programs across applications.
  • suggesting the appropriate owning application, and documenting the source-level and object-level dependencies between applications.
  • automatically creating part of the configuration for the dbb-zAppBuild build framework by generating property files for the application's artifacts based on provided configuration mappings.

Visit the DBB Git Migration-Modeler repository to learn more and try it out!

Enterprise DevOps pipelines with the z/OS-native GitLab Runner

Mathieu Dalbin

You've been waiting for a long time, and now it's here! Thanks to the z/OS Open Tools project, which is specialized in porting Open Source tools to the z/OS® platform, the z/OS-native GitLab Runner is now available to the community, allowing a seamless integration of the z/OS environment into enterprise CI/CD pipelines. read more...

Still on DBB 1.1.x? This is your sign to upgrade.

As announced last year, DBB version 1.1.x will be going out of support on April 30, 2024 (see product lifecycle details here). To help customers understand the migration process from DBB 1.1.x to DBB 2.0, the IBM® DevOps Acceleration Team (DAT) blogged about how they uplifted their own demonstration environment (GitLab with an originally Derby-based DBB metadata store) in a non-disruptive way:

Worried about cloning your large Z code Git repo?

Ian J Mitchell

TL;DR Don't worry about the size of your repos, they will be fine.

I've seen and heard a few mainframe development teams new to Git be fairly shocked when they realise what the word 'distributed' means when we say it is a 'distributed version control system'. read more...