Continuous delivery in CICS
To meet increasing expectations and demands, CICS® is bringing out new deliveries between product releases through the service channel or as separate downloads. CICS continuous delivery offers you opportunities to try out and use new functions, capabilities, and technologies on a much shorter cadence, so that you can realize the value of these additions, without the need to wait for the next major release or the need to completely reinstall the CICS environment.
How can you benefit from CICS continuous delivery?
You can benefit from CICS continuous delivery in several ways:
- Selectively roll out discrete additions of function. You can choose to deploy the function on specific CICS regions or across CICSPlexes, during the system software maintenance cycle.
- Gain the advantages of new functions before the next release availability.
- Implement new functions on lower-level systems, if available, making administration of mixed levels of CICS systems easier.
- Reduce the risk of introducing a large change at release level, by continuously implementing functions earlier.
How can you get continuous delivery features?
Most continuous delivery features are made available through APARs. In addition, CICS TS V5.4 introduced support for feature toggles. These allow IBM® to deliver new capability in the base product, and you can choose when or where to enable that capability by toggling the feature on or off. For more information about feature toggles, see CICS feature toggles and continuous delivery.
Will continuous delivery features cost you more?
Capabilities introduced through continuous delivery are available to existing CICS licensees, with no additional purchase required. They are delivered through the same mechanism as other service material, and may be applied as such. For more information, see Upgrading between releases with CICS continuous delivery.
Find out more
For availability of continuous delivery features by release of CICS TS, see CICS continuous delivery features.