This IBM® Redbooks® publication discusses the real world experience of an enterprise that developed and implemented IBM z/OS® cloud services. This book shares the experience of a team at Walmart Technology, Walmart Stores, Inc.® and some of the decisions they made to create business critical cloud services. These experiences and approaches relate to the z/OS platform, and might not apply to other hybrid cloud approaches. This book highlights the strengths and characteristics of z/OS that led the Walmart infrastructure and software engineers to use this platform as they transitioned from a traditional IT deployment to a cloud model. Embarking on a cloud strategy can be overwhelming. No shortage of approaches to cloud computing exists. This book focuses on a pragmatic approach for enterprises that are struggling to take advantage of their business assets in the cloud. This book introduces the basic cloud concepts as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Each chapter explains the importance of a particular NIST characteristic, the z/OS role in accomplishing the characteristic, and how it was implemented by the Walmart Technology team. This book is intended for IT professionals who are considering extending their IBM z SystemsTM environment to a hybrid cloud by unleashing the power of cloud services on z/OS. For information about creating cloud services that are hosted in IBM CICS®, see How Walmart Became a Cloud Services Provider with IBM CICS, SG24-8347.

Today, organizations are responding to market demands and regulatory requirements faster than ever by extending their applications and data to new digital applications. This drive to deliver new functions at speed has paved the way for a huge growth in cloud-native applications, hosted in both public and private cloud infrastructures. Leading organizations are now exploiting the best of both worlds by combining their traditional enterprise IT with cloud. This hybrid cloud approach places new requirements on the integration architectures needed to bring these two worlds together. One of the largest providers of application logic and data services in enterprises today is IBM Z, making it a critical service provider in a hybrid cloud architecture. The primary goal of this IBM Redpaper publication is to help IT architects choose between the different application integration architectures that can be used for hybrid integration with IBM Z, including REST APIs, messaging, and event streams.

Modernization of enterprise IT applications and infrastructure is key to the survival of organizations. It is no longer a matter of choice. The cost of missing out on business opportunities in an intensely competitive market can be enormous. To aid in their success, organizations are facing increased encouragement to embrace change. They are pushed to think of new and innovative ways to counter, or offer, a response to threats that are posed by competitors who are equally as aggressive in adopting newer methods and technologies. The term modernization often varies in meaning based on perspective. This IBM® Redbooks® publication focuses on the technological advancements that unlock computing environments that are hosted on IBM Z® to enable secure processing at the core of hybrid. This publication is intended for IT executives, IT managers, IT architects, System Programmers, and Application Developer professionals.

The world has changed. With the new cloud options, enterprises no longer must rely on only their IT organization to meet their computing needs. Business units now have options that were not available just a few years ago. They can get some of their needs met by traditional IT processes, and reach out to a cloud provider to meet other needs. The concern is that if you, working in a traditional IT organization, do not meet these needs, someone else will. This IBM® Redbooks® publication helps you to understand the benefits of becoming your own cloud service provider. It describes a simple approach that allows you to be successful. The main focus of the book is lessons learned from the implementation by an IBM client, Walmart Stores, Inc.®, that achieved impressive results in their efforts to become their own cloud service provider to their developer community. In this way, Walmart successfully made z Systems a relevant part of their Hybrid Cloud strategy. Walmart embarked on this journey to help their application developers achieve results that were previously time-consuming and difficult to deliver. In the process, they realized that they had everything that they needed to become a services provider to their developer community. This book describes the choices that Walmart made, and explains the steps they took to be successful. The goal of the book is not to imply that the only way to achieve success is by following Walmart's process exactly. Rather, this book allows you to use the same basic constructs, but choose implementation details that fit your environment so that you can achieve success on your own terms. With IBM CICS® Transaction Server (TS) for z/OS®, you also have the resources for a successful transition to becoming your own cloud service provider. IBM Design Thinking is a methodology that is used by designers to solve complex problems by focusing on individual user roles. This book is organized from the viewpoint of these roles in the IT organization. It provides guidance in the following areas: What does the line of business expect from a cloud service? What topology and high availability characteristics does the system programmer need? What unique facilities does IBM CICS provide to the service developer? How does a developer discover and consume services in an application? How does the operations team manage the service in production? One of the services that Walmart built and how the decisions made by each job role affected the overall outcome of the service are used as an example throughout this book. It shares the experience of the team that created this and other business critical cloud services that are all hosted in CICS. Comments from Walmart IT leaders that were captured during the authoring process are presented to emphasize why the company adopted cloud and how cloud has helped Walmart to achieve success. Developers understand the risk protection that IT groups provide. They also understand that waiting to move applications to production, or for a service to be provisioned, compromises the agile environment required by today's businesses. This book is intended for enterprise service providers looking to enable their developers to increase the speed at which functionality is delivered to the business. For more information about creating IBM z/OS cloud services, see Creating IBM z/OS Cloud Services, SG24-8324

In this IBM® Redbooks® publication, we show you a cloud services scenario on IBM z/OS®. In the scenario, we show you how to perform the following tasks: Subscribe to a service to provision an IBM CICS® system. Assign resources to the CICS system. Use a template to tailor the CICS service Publish the service in our Marketplace Use that service to create a CICS region and start it. Deprovision the CICS region once it is no longer required. We explain the basic terms that are associated with the cloud services and which roles play a part in creating, using, and maintaining a cloud service. We show you how we used IBM z/OSMF to provision a CICS Transaction Server (TS) System Management Single Server (SMSS) in a controlled laboratory environment. The goal of this paper is to provide you with an overview of how a cloud service can be created and used on z/OS. This paper is intended for infrastructure support staff and application development staff who require middleware to develop and maintain business applications that use middleware.

It's easy to look at the title of a book and think "that's old news" or "I already know all there is to know on that subject." But before you dismiss this publication, consider just how far the IBM® Parallel Sysplex® architecture has come. From the early days the mainframe has embraced a shared everything approach. The original designers coded IBM z/OS® (called IBM MVSTM or IBM OS/390® back then) with the functionality necessary for the operating system to create the repositories, manage the data flow, and ensure the integrity of the systems involved. From there, the middleware systems provided the exploitation and advanced functions to mature the technology. The component in the middle of all this great technology can easily be taken for granted. That is the IBM Coupling Facility. This IBM Redbooks® publication discusses both traditional uses for the IBM Coupling Facility technology and new ways to use it with products such as IBM CICS®. You can learn how to perform new functions and have these functions benefit from the scalability and availability achieved only in a mainframe ecosystem. Open standards are a large part of considerations today, as most companies run IT shops with a mix of technology components. As the world embraces these technologies, it is necessary to understand how to mix the world of mainframe architectures and products with other open architectures. This mix allows the best tool to be used to solve processing needs, at the right cost and service levels. Often the functions needed for modern processing can be found in house, in places where staff are skilled and that already deliver the robust production environments you count on daily. This book discusses these modern functions and how to achieve them with CICS use of the IBM Coupling Facility. You will learn how one IBM client, Walmart, took these concepts far beyond the original design as they share their experiences and even share code examples to help you get started. The last chapter of this book shows what can be achieved when a combination of old and new functions are use together. Even if you have familiarity with what could be done with the IBM Coupling Facility in the past, there is much to learn and deploy in a modern world. Those who are familiar with the IBM Coupling Facility might find the content of this book helpful. Additionally, readers who are considering how to use the IBM Coupling Facility technology within their environment might also find useful information in the chapters that follow

This IBM® Redbooks® publication helps you install, customize, and configure an IBM z13® and build z/OS® environments. This book is intended for those readers who are new to the platform and are faced with the task of installing a mainframe for the first time. By the term mainframe in this instance, we refer to the hardware and the system software. The intention is to show you how this installation can be done. Volume 1 shows you how we set up a mainframe and installed z/OS V2R2 and IBM DB2® V11. The starting point is a basic hardware configuration of an IBM z13 and DS8000® as shipped from the factory. Volume 1 shows you how the following milestones were achieved: Creating a configuration for the Customized Offering Driver (COD) system Stand-alone restoration of the COD Expanding the configuration Installing the z/OS V2R2 ServerPac Loading and running IVPs for z/OS ServerPac Installing DB2 ServerPac and IVPs This publication includes figures that show you how the initial builds were achieved. For this book, we designed a scenario and show you how to build that scenario step-by-step. Although your requirements likely differ from our scenario, we intend to provide you with an example to show you how it can be done and samples and downloadable materials that you can choose to modify to bring you closer to meeting your needs. This book is divided into the following parts: Part 1: Overview and Planning In this part, we introduce you to how we approached the project. Part 2: Configuration and builds In this part, we describe the tasks that must be completed to create the initial build for the scenario that is described in Part 1.