Mainframe as a Service

IBM has recently announced an expansion to its Z-series mainframe on the IBM Cloud. The changes, according to IBM, have reduced the time it takes to access z/OS development and test environments from days to minutes – around six minutes they suggest. Not surprisingly, they suggest that IBM Cloud for z/OS development is 15 times faster than using an x86 environment.

In effect, IBM will be offering virtual machines that people can use as mainframe test and development environments with the intention of creating cloud-based virtual production environments. The set-up is currently available as a closed experiment, but will become generally available in the second half of the year. Users get on-demand access to z/OS and can develop and test applications that they are working on.

IBM is actually delivering IBM Wazi as a Service (Wazi aaS), which is what makes the z/OS capabilities available to IBM Cloud.

According to the IBM on-boarding site; “IBM Wazi Developer is a productive development environment that fully integrates into any enterprise-wide standard DevOps pipeline. IBM Wazi Developer delivers three key components – Wazi Sandbox, Wazi Code, and Wazi Analyze to let you analyze, develop, build, test, and deploy z/OS application code with modern tools.”

Using Wazi as a Service, users can create development and test systems in IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud. And, as mentioned earlier, IBM claims this can be done in just six minutes. Users can then manage virtual machine-based compute, storage, and networking resources in a private, secure space that they have defined. Wazi Image Builder lets users create custom images from their on-premises LPAR. Wazi Image Builder includes a web UI with role-based access and REST APIs to streamline the creation process.

According to the press release, Wazi aaS is being designed to help developers:

• Increase speed and agility with on-demand access to z/OS for development and test
• Accelerate DevOps practices with predictable and flexible consumption-based pricing
• Reduce the need for specialised skills with a consistent cloud-native development experience.

IBM is also working with ecosystem partners such as TCS and BMC to help IBM Z clients accelerate the modernization of their applications, data, and processes in an open hybrid cloud architecture.

You might be wondering how much of the cloud marketplace IBM has. Statista has some estimates. They reckon that AWS has 33 percent, Azure 21 percent, and Google Cloud has 10 percent. Alibaba has six percent, and then comes IBM with four percent. So, anything that boosts that figure has got to be good for the company. Just out of interest, Salesforce and Tencent have three percent each, and Oracle has two percent. I wonder how much IBM would have to pay to buy AWS?

Running test and development in the cloud makes a great deal of sense for most organizations who can keep the mainframe in the data centre running just production workloads. It reduces the need to worry about development workloads pushing up the rolling 4-hour average(R4HA) of MSUs (Millions of Service Units) consumed at a site. And it also gives organizations better control over their costs.

I’m sure that there will be a big demand for this service from IBM once it goes live later in the year not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because it will be possible for anyone (with the right credentials) to go to IBM Cloud and quickly provision Z resources. And then rapidly develop applications, test applications, and bring those applications back into their on-prem environment for very rapid production deployment. It fills a need that many companies are, perhaps, only just realizing that they have.