What is IBM z/OS Connect?

IBM z/OS Connect provides a centralized framework to enable z/OS Assets to be exposed as RESTful APIs and z/OS applications to call RESTful APIs. The framework provides you a quick and easy way to deploy, manage, and audit APIs.

z/OS Connect provides RESTful API access to z/OS applications and data that is hosted in subsystems such as CICS®, IMS, IBM MQ, and Db2®. The framework provides concurrent access, through a common interface, to multiple z/OS subsystems. In this mode, z/OS Connect is an API provider.

z/OS Connect also provides the capability for CICS, IMS, and z/OS applications to access any RESTful endpoint, inside or outside z/OS, through RESTful APIs with JSON formatted messages. In this mode, z/OS Connect is an API requester.

WebSphere Application Server Liberty profile

The z/OS Connect product is built on the WebSphere Application Server for z/OS Liberty profile, which is a component-based runtime for Java™ web and enterprise applications, and is lightweight and easily configurable. For more information, see WebSphere Application Server Liberty overview. z/OS Connect relies on many of Liberty’s core capabilities for essential functions. For example, z/OS Connect Server configuration is based on the same style of XML files that are used by Liberty, and can use many of the security features provided by Liberty. For this reason, this documentation includes links to the WebSphere Application Server for z/OS Liberty documentation when a relevant topic is applicable to IBM z/OS Connect.

Note:

The installation of Liberty that is included with z/OS Connect is dedicated to running z/OS Connect Servers, and cannot be used to host any other applications. Therefore, not all of the facilities that are described in the Liberty documentation are applicable for use with z/OS Connect.

Do not attempt to run your own applications in the same Liberty server where z/OS Connect is running. Such usage is not supported.

z/OS Connect can help to deliver benefits for an enterprise in the following ways:

Mobile and cloud application developers, inside or outside the enterprise, can incorporate z/OS data and transactions into their applications without the need to understand z/OS subsystems. The z/OS resources appear as any other RESTful API.
z/OS application programmers can take advantage of published RESTful APIs to incorporate service and data into their business applications.

IBM z/OS Connect features and deployment

z/OS Connect has two base features: zosConnect-2.0 and zosConnect-3.0. zosConnect-2.0 is applicable to APIs conforming to the OpenAPI 2.0 specification and zosConnect-3.0 is applicable to APIs conforming to the OpenAPI 2.0 and the OpenAPI 3.0 specification.

z/OS Connect can either be deployed to run natively on Z, or when using the zosConnect-3.0 feature, can be deployed on an OCI-compliant container platform, such as Red Hat® OpenShift®, z/OS Container Platform, or IBM z/OS Container Extensions.

When deployed on Z, z/OS Connect has the benefits of System Authorization Facility (SAF) security and z/OS Workload Manager (WLM) integration. WLM integration means different URIs can have varying levels of priority and performance criteria.

IBM z/OS Connect components

To indicate which of the z/OS Connect components is available with which z/OS Connect feature, Table 1 summarizes the z/OS Connect components with the supporting features.

Tip: Some topics in this documentation apply only to specific z/OS Connect features. These topics are marked with tags. For example:

zosConnect-2.0 – content relevant only to the zosConnect-2.0 feature.
zosConnect-3.0 – content relevant only to the zosConnect-3.0 feature.

To learn more about these tags and other tags used in the z/OS Connect documentation, see Documentation tags.

Table 1. z/OS Connect component summary with supported z/OS Connect features
		zosConnect-2.0	zosConnect-3.0
Development	API Toolkit	Yes	No
	Build Toolkit	Yes	No
	z/OS Connect Designer (container image)	No	Yes Containers
	API provider Gradle plug-in	No	Yes Containers Started task
	API requester Gradle plug-in	No	Yes Started task
	z/OS Connect development tools for Visual Studio Code	No	Yes
Runtime	z/OS Connect Server	Yes Started task	Yes Started task
	z/OS Connect Server image (container image)	No	Yes Containers
Monitoring	SMF	Yes Started task	Yes Started task Containers (See note)
Monitoring	OpenTelemetry	No	Yes Started task Containers (See note)
Policy		Yes Started task	Yes Started task

Note: zosConnect-3.0 Monitoring is available for container deployments on z/OS when using IBM z/OS Container Platform.