Creating a CI/CD pipeline for z/OS applications

If you are a Build Administrator, you can take advantage of the pipeline capability that is provided by IBM® Wazi Developer for Red Hat® CodeReady Workspaces (IBM Wazi Developer). The pipeline is at the heart of the DevOps transformation by providing the underlying infrastructure to automate the work flow of application development. It reduces the time necessary between a request from a customer and its implementation, prevents any human errors, and provides standardized feedback loops to developers. Moreover, its implementation is made easy through a graphic interface.

Using OpenShift®, you can create a CI/CD pipeline to define and automate the whole lifecycle of z/OS® applications, from the building stage to the provisioning and deploying stages. At the final stage of the CI/CD pipeline, applications are deployed into production on native z/OS running on IBM Z® hardware.

After the developer validated the modified code and debugged it in the IDE, the CI/CD pipeline takes the committed code. Then, the CI/CD pipeline automatically builds, tests, qualifies and deploys the code to the target z/OS system. The target z/OS system can be the Wazi Sandbox for the testing stage and real LPAR for the production stage.

The scenario that is presented in this section illustrates how to set the pipeline to run automatic builds in OpenShift for MVS™ applications on z/OS. To test the pipeline creation, you can apply the following scenario to your own environment. The scenario involves the following three steps:
  1. Installing the required products.
  2. Configuring a Jenkins server in OpenShift by creating a Jenkins z/OS image stream, a Jenkins server instance, and a Jenkins z/OS agent.
  3. Creating a z/OS OpenShift build configuration and starting a build.

For technical details about pipelines in OpenShift, you can refer to the Pipeline build section of the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

If you want to create the full CI/CD pipeline that includes the provisioning and deploying stages, you can explore the links that are included in the full scenario sample at the end of this section. On the same page, a link also takes you to a tutorial where GitLab CI is used instead of Jenkins.