By Manny Veiga
As its name suggests, DevOps describes cooperation between the development and operations areas of a business, in the interest of sharing processes across functions. It’s a cultural and workflow change that ensures an organization’s software developers and IT operations are working together to increase performance and speed when developing, testing and deploying new client-facing applications.
Why should mainframe professionals care about DevOps? Because they’re responsible for the backend systems that support customer-facing innovations in an increasingly demanding digital economy. The same trends that require the development and operations teams to create and deploy solutions faster, smarter and better will also force mainframe professionals to change the way they support backend systems to accommodate new business objectives.
DevOps’ spirit of collaboration, then, needs to extend to the mainframe unit as well. That’s why SHARE in San Antonio 2016 will include a new DevOps track, with sessions that delve into the competitive advantage enjoyed by organizations with mainframe teams in broader DevOps transformations. We’ll also discuss the process and cultural changes needed for mainframe teams to adapt DevOps.
Central to any discussion about the mainframe/DevOps connection is an acknowledgement of mainframe’s integral role in supporting today’s rapidly expanding computing loads. According to IBM Systems Magazine, between 70 and 80 percent of the world’s corporate data resides on System Z servers, which supports transactions for up to 91 percent of client-facing applications.
Innovation in the industry – like the release of the IBM z13 mainframe, designed to support up to 2.5 billion daily transactions – underscore why the mainframe is a core component supporting today’s mobile, cloud and virtual economy. But, mainframes need to support more than just speed and mobility – they also need to be as secure as ever to continue serving as systems of record for their organizations.
Satisfying all these objectives takes a lot of work, which is why mainframe operations and development teams need to brought into the culture of cooperation, communication and transparency that DevOps introduces to the rest of the enterprise. DevOps offers the framework to achieve this, and, during the DevOps track at SHARE in San Antonio, we’ll cover the changes that businesses need to make to bring new ways of thinking about development and operations into the mainframe environment.
SHARE in San Antonio will be held from February 29 to March 4 this year at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. Click to register for the event or view the full agenda.