Rocket Software has additional IBM I platform support as part of its relaunch of a DevOps platform that also runs on IBM mainframes.
Chris Wey, president of the data modernization business unit at Rocket Software, said Rocket DevOps’ continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform will enable organizations that use both Midrange forms and IBM I mainframes modernize application development and deployment. using a common framework.
The modernization of mainframe application development has been underway for some time. A Rocket Software survey of more than 500 US IT professionals found that 44% of respondents use multiple DevOps tools, but just under a quarter (24%) have a platform. – full DevOps form.
Rocket Software is expanding its DevOps reach to include the IBM I platform because organizations that rely on this platform have the same pressing need as other organizations to build applications faster, Wey said.
It’s unclear to what extent organizations are still building new applications for what have become venerable IBM platforms. rocket software investigation found that while 82% of respondents migrate their workloads to the cloud, only 4% say they complete a full cloud migration. The bulk of most mission-critical applications running on mainframes are online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that require a level of processing capability that still cannot be easily matched using any other platform. There are many cases where certain classes of workloads have been migrated off the mainframe to run on less expensive platforms. However, many enterprise applications continue to run faster on mainframes than they could on any other platform.
In most cases, Wey noted, organizations will be deploying and updating applications in hybrid cloud computing environments for years to come. The immediate challenge they face is the lack of DevOps skills among IT teams managing IBM I systems and mainframes, he added.
Rocket Software also provides access to a set of application development tools to build modern applications on IBM platforms. More recently, the company added support for an open source Python software development (SDK) that IBM created for the Python programming language to the Rocket Open AppDev for Z framework to create mainframe applications.
The overarching goal is to make IBM platforms more accessible to a wider range of application developers and DevOps professionals who work primarily on distributed computing platforms today, Wey noted.
Somehow, the gap that used to exist between legacy platforms and distributed computing systems continues to narrow. Many organizations are trying to reduce the total cost of IT by centralizing the management of these two categories of systems instead of continuing to hire and retain separate IT teams.
The IBM I platform traces its lineage to the AS/400 systems which were first released in 1988 as an embedded mid-range minicomputer rivaling Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) VAX/VMS systems. More than 30 years later, many IBM I platforms are still working well after the demise of VAX/VMS systems.