Understand what containers are and how they are used by IBM® z/OS® Connect.
Containers and container concepts
If you are new to container concepts, the following IBM
Cloud Education resources provide an explanation of containers, container orchestration, and cloud
native development. These concepts are vital for working with the OpenAPI 3 support of IBM z/OS Connect.
Containerization
The following article explores the history of containerization, the benefits and advantages of
using the technology, and how it relates to virtualization:
The following articles look at the importance of containers in cloud computing, highlighting the
core benefits, and tour the emerging ecosystem of related technologies:
Docker is an open source platform for building,
deploying, and managing containerized applications. In this documentation, the quick start tutorials
use Docker Desktop to run the z/OS Connect Designer image.
What is Docker?
If you are new to Docker, the IBM Cloud Education article What is Docker?
explains why it has become so widely adopted. The section Docker tools and terms is of special interest to z/OS Connect users.
IBM z/OS Connect as a containerized
application
Figure 1
illustrates the structure of a IBM z/OS Connect container
image. The layers of a container image can be customized to suit your requirements.Figure 1. A typical container image
What is a layer ?
Each layer is an image itself that stores the changes compared to the image it is based on.
Layers exist to save on computational effort and time when building images.
Layers are used to avoid transferring existing information and skip the build steps that have
not changed.
For more information, see Images and layers in the Docker documentation.
