Continuous delivery and deployment automation. A continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is strategic to fully embrace DevOps. Continuous integration is a software development process in which developers integrate the new code they have written more frequently throughout the development cycle. The next steps in the DevOps cycle are continuous delivery and deployment.
Continuous delivery is a development practice where software is built in such a way that it can be released into production at any given time. This practice involves the ability to provision the needed test environments for various phases of testing. Typically, application changes are automatically deployed into various testing environments that test for any number of errors and inconsistencies. Once the changes are release-ready, the system can automatically push the updates directly to the software applications production environment as part of a standard deployment pipeline. In continuous deployment, the code changes to an application can be released automatically into the production environment without manual intervention.
Work smarter and minimize risk by discovering application insights and make changes with confidence.
Delivering software and services at the speed the market demands requires teams to work together, iterate rapidly, and deploy new versions frequently. Imagine a world where production releases are triggered for applications which span hybrid environments without any manual interactions, just the release manager performing a single click deployment and, if needed, a single click rollback.
This is possible when enterprise development teams use common practices and methods of delivery. This means that mainframe practices must evolve so they can be managed and operated by standard tools and technologies adopted across the enterprise. For example, with Git as the defacto source control for most distributed systems, it makes sense to standardize mainframe sources to Git and practice the standard git-based workflows across the organization.
The integrated pipeline is the backbone of the value stream. By leveraging a standard integrated pipeline for the enterprise that incorporates standard DevOps processes with Git workflows and GitOps in a consistent way, clients can reduce complexity and empower organizations’ development practices to more efficiently deliver business outcomes. It also enables application teams across the enterprise to collaborate better and quickly respond to increasing market pressures and business demands.
To learn more, check out this case study.
Depending on your requirements, you can chose the appropriate approach to deploy your applications and infrastructure.
IBM® Wazi Deploy is a scripted deployment tool that drives z/OS application
deployment and can easily be integrated into a
Learn more at Deploying to z/OS with IBM Wazi Deploy.
Part of IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition (IDzEE), IBM Wazi Deploy can help you to script the rollback process well ahead of time and at the time of rollback. It utilizes the previously taken backups and can bring the system to previous well-perfomed state within minutes, without any requirement for highly skilled professionals doing manual tasks.
IBM DevOps Deploy is a UI driven workflow design based deployment automation tool that drives application deployment for all the platforms in an enterprise including IBM Z®. IBM DevOps Deploy has full CD capabilty and uses a plugin driven approach to customize and configure deployment automation in an enterprise.
Learn more at Introduction to DevOps Deploy and Deploying to z/OS with IBM DevOps Deploy.
IBM DevOps Deploy can help you to design the rollback process in a plug and play flowchart like process and can utilize the backups to bring the system automatically to a previous well-performed state within minutes.
Learn more at Automatic rollbacks in DevOps Deploy
Enterprises deploy hundreds of applications into production every day. In response to developer and user demands, infrastructure is constantly being spun up, torn down, scaled up, and scaled down. To meet these demands, it is essential for organizations to automate infrastructure to control costs, reduce risks, and respond with speed to new business opportunities and competitive threats. This same principle applies to IBM Z Infrastructure.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) offers a way forward. It uses a high-level descriptive coding language to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure. This enables easy onboarding of new system administrators and programmers and allows for processes that are tribal knowledge to be streamlined into repeatable automation. IaC enables DevOps teams to rapidly create and version infrastructure in the same way they version source code and to track these versions to avoid inconsistency among IT environments that can lead to serious issues during deployment. IBM offers flexible solutions for your IaC journey.
Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z helps connect IBM Z to your wider enterprise automation strategy. The Red Hat Ansible Certified Content accelerates the journey to IaC by driving best practices to manage automation in source control and enabling a common approach for hybrid applications and infrastructure management.
Learn more at the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z content solution.
Read about how to get started with Ansible and IBM Z.
Read about how to install and configure Wazi Deploy.
Explore IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS documentation.
Our prescriptive guidance for applying DevOps to IBM Z aims to align tools, working practices, and outcomes with other platforms in your enterprise as much as we can.
See the capabilities of Wazi Deploy to support static scenarios, in which artifacts to deploy are obtained after a successful build.
Shifting from a legacy SCM on Z to Git is a big change, but what does that mean to the everyday developer? This video series goes through the software development lifecycle using Git workflow and modern tools to accelerate the delivery of high quality code.
3-day free trial: IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS
3-day free trial: Bring Your Own (BYO) IDE for Cloud Native Development
Comprehensive, robust toolset for developing z/OS applications
Continuous delivery of any application to any environment
An integrated development toolset to accelerate the delivery of applications
Work smarter and minimize risk by discovering application insights and make changes with confidence.
Simplify life for developers building hybrid cloud applications with a cloud native development experience for z/OS.
Transform z/OS hybrid application testing for continuous integration.
Automate IBM Z applications and IT infrastructure.
A new Other resources tab was added to the Technical resources section.
The Multimedia tab of the Technical resources section was renamed Videos and was updated with a link to the Day in the life of a mainframe developer video series.
The Related solutions section was updated.