Hybrid IT refers to a combination of multiple public clouds as well as private clouds, on-premises virtualized infrastructure and legacy or traditional on-premises infrastructure.
However, hybrid IT is more than a random collection of environments – it is an intentional choice on the part of IT leadership who recognize that different environments bring different assets and capabilities to the enterprise.
As their hybrid IT strategies mature, many organizations are taking the next step: cloud-native computing. Cloud-native computing extends the best practices of the cloud to all of IT, thus bringing elasticity, resilience, as-a-Service business models, and other core cloud practices to the on-premises world.
Hybrid IT requires consistent management, security, and software deployment across all environments. Cloud-native computing goes one step further, requiring cloud-centric principles apply to on-premises assets as well, even for organizations with mainframes.
Nevertheless, the mainframe is often left out of hybrid IT discussions – to the detriment of the organizations that leverage them to meet customer needs. It is thus essential for any organization with a hybrid IT strategy and on-premises mainframes to understand how the mainframe can actively participate in this transformational approach.
Organizational Change Breaks Down Mainframe Silos
Once the IT team realizes that they require a combination of on-premises and cloud-based resources, they soon realize that they need a consistent approach to managing and securing their various environments. The team also requires a common way to create and deploy software across the breadth of their hybrid IT landscape.
Cultural change is the starting point for such transformation. In fact, digital, DevOps, and hybrid IT best practices all require organizations to break down organizational and technical silos within the IT organization – while the mainframe has long represented the most siloed department within IT.
The first step in moving toward hybrid IT, therefore, is to move away from this ‘bimodal IT’ antipattern to a more collaborative, cross-cutting organizational structure that recognizes that mainframe software development is simply software development, mainframe security is part of enterprise cybersecurity, and managing the mainframe is but one element of modern IT operations.
Such cross-cutting reorganization is not simply a ‘nice to have,’ but aligns with the digital priorities of the organization. Take mobile banking as the prototypical example. On the one hand, all banks need mobile apps that are fully modern and deliver deep functionality, as for many banks (consumer banks in particular), the mobile app is the only salient differentiator it can put into the hands of its customers.
But a mobile banking app is more than a front-end application. Every transaction on the app must make a complete round trip to the mainframe. The entire IT infrastructure between mobile app and mainframe, therefore, represents the true digital application – and security, management, and software development efforts must recognize this fact for banks to remain competitive and secure.
DevOps Drives the Mainframe Hybrid IT Story
Such end-to-end reorganization is at the core of DevOps, but is not the whole story. There are actually two sides to DevOps: the cultural and organizational shift that breaks down silos and fosters greater collaboration on one hand, and a single set of tools that automate software lifecycle tasks across the entire enterprise on the other.
Companies that are successful with DevOps leverage dramatically improved automation as well as greater collaboration across the software lifecycle to drive new paradigms for development and deployment of software: continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), respectively.
Today, CI largely depends on an approach to building and assembling software at scale we call GitOps, after Git, the open source distributed version-control system. GitOps enables diverse development teams to work in parallel without slowing the development effort down.
CD, in contrast, centers on releasing code into production – leveraging automation and policy-driven governance while accelerating software deployment and automating monitoring and alerting in the live production environment.
Neither CI nor CD is technology, language, operating system, or environment specific. On the contrary, many enterprise software initiatives involve a mix of different instances of these elements, including the combination of environments that are core to hybrid IT.
When a mainframe is in the mix, therefore, the DevOps approach requires both collaboration among mainframe and ‘non-mainframe’ people as well as a single set of automation tools that handle both CI and CD – not just for the mainframe itself, but across the entire hybrid IT software lifecycle.
The Importance of Zowe to Hybrid IT
To address these challenges, Broadcom (formerly CA Technologies), Rocket Software, and IBM are collaborating on Zowe, an open source effort of the Open Mainframe Project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.
The goal of Zowe is essentially to equip mainframe developers with all the tools they need to be first-class DevOps participants – both during the development process where CI applies, as well as deploying software into production the CD way.
It’s important to note that Zowe is much more than ‘doing DevOps on the mainframe.’ Such a perspective would suggest that the mainframe would remain a distinct environment, rather than one of many hybrid IT environments. In reality, Zowe is the backbone of the next generation of the mainframe IDEs.
The Intellyx Take
While hybrid IT provides consistency across multiple environments, it also recognizes that each type of environment brings its own strengths to the table. Public clouds have their place, as do on-premises virtualized environments – and so too does the mainframe.
Zowe – as well as commercial extensions of the open source project like Broadcom Brightside – position the mainframe as one of the environment choices available to DevOps personnel as they deploy software in a hybrid IT environment.
With technologies like Zowe, the mainframe has its own place alongside the rest of the environments available to hybrid IT – as a first-class citizen.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Broadcom and IBM are Intellyx customers, and Rocket Software is a former Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. Image credit: Anthony Arrigo.
