CICS feature toggles and continuous delivery

CICS® TS continuous delivery delivers new functional enhancements on a much shorter cadence, providing much more rapid access to those new features. Usually, these features are not CICS base functions and are disabled by default. To enable and use these features in your CICS region, you must configure feature toggles when you set up the CICS region. With this feature toggling mechanism, you have great flexibility and control in enablement of such features.

Benefits

Using feature toggling has the following benefits:

  • Rapid enablement and configuration of new features for trial in your test environment and for use in your production environment
  • Flexibility and easier control over the features that are switched on for use and the CICS regions where the enabled features are available
  • Lower risk of trying and using new features

Overview of feature toggle configuration

To enable and use toggle-enabled features in your CICS region, you must set up one or more feature toggle configuration files, in which you switch features on or off and set feature configuration options. For a list of available toggle-enabled features by release, see Toggle-enabled features, support by release.

There are two types of feature toggle configuration files: a group-level file and a region-level file. Both files are optional. If neither is present, default values are used.

You can use a group-level file to control the features that you want to enable in a group of CICS regions. By use of the optional parameter finalize in the group-level file, you can lock specific settings that are defined in the group-level file, preventing region-level files from overriding these settings.

You can use a region-level file to try out a feature on a single region before it is enabled in the production environment.

For detailed instructions on how to specify feature toggles and set configuration options and on how to set up feature toggle configuration files, see Specifying feature toggles.

Processing of feature toggle configuration files in system initialization

The feature toggle configuration files are read at CICS startup, immediately after system initialization reads the SIT parameters. The group-level file is read first, followed by the region-level file. Settings in the region-level file overrides settings in the group-level file except group-level settings that are specified with the parameter finalize.