z Systems Software & Applications Currency: MQ Continuous & as a Service Delivery Models

In a rapidly-moving technology environment where DevOps is driving innovation for the rapid delivery of applications, are there any innovations for the related z Systems infrastructure (E.g. z/OS, CICS, DB2, IMS, MQ, WebSphere AS) that can deliver faster software and indeed firmware updates?

In April 2016, IBM announced MQ V9.0, delivering new and enhanced capabilities facilitating a Continuous Delivery and support model.  The traditional Long Term Support release offers the ubiquitous collection of aggregated fix-packs, applied to the delivered MQ V9.0 function.  The new Continuous Delivery release delivers both fixes and new functional enhancements as a set of modification-level updates, facilitating more rapid access to functional enhancements.

Form a terminology viewpoint, the Continuous Delivery (CD) support model, introduces new function and enhancements, made available by incremental updates within the same version and release.  Additionally, there will also be a Long Term Support (LTS) release available for deployments that require traditional medium-long term security and defect fixes only.  Some might classify such LTS fixes as Service Pack or Level Set patching.  The Continuous Delivery (CD) support approach delivers regular updates with a short-term periodic frequency for customers wanting to exploit the latest features and capabilities of MQ, without waiting for the next long term support release cycle.  In terms of timeframe, although there is no fixed time period associated with a CD or LTS release, typically CD is every few months, while LTS releases are every two years or so.  In actual IBM announcement terms, the latest MQ release was V9.0.3 in May 2017, meaning four MQ V9.0.n release activities in a ~13 Month period, approximately quarterly…

The benefits of this CD support model are obvious, for those organizations who consider themselves to be leading-edge or “amongst the first”, they can leverage from new function ASAP, with a modicum of confidence that the code has a good level of stability.  Those customers with a more cautious approach, can continue their ~2 year software upgrade cycle, applying the LTS release.  As always with software maintenance, there has never been a perfect approach.  Inevitably there will by High Impact or PERvasive (HIPER) and PTF-in Error (PE) PTF requirements, as software function stability is forever evolving.  Therefore, arguably those sites leveraging from the latest function have always been running from a Continuous Delivery software maintenance model; they just didn’t know when and how often!

Of all the major IBM z Systems subsystems to introduce this new software support model first, clearly the role of MQ dictates that for many reasons, primarily middleware and interoperability based, MQ needs a Continuous Delivery (CD) model.

At this stage, let’s remind ourselves of the important role that MQ plays in our IT infrastructures.  IBM MQ is a robust messaging middleware solution, simplifying and accelerating the integration of diverse applications and business data, typically distributed over multiple platforms and geographies.  MQ facilitates the assured, secure and reliable exchange of information between applications, systems, services, and files.  This exchange of information is achieved through the sending and receiving of message data through queues and topics, simplifying the creation and maintenance of business applications.  MQ delivers a universal messaging solution incorporating a broad set of offerings, satisfying enterprise requirements, in addition to providing 21st century connectivity for Mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Because of the centralized role that MQ plays, its pivotal role of interconnectivity might be hampered by the DevOps requirement of rapid application delivery, for both planned and unplanned business requirements.  Therefore even before the concept of MQ Continuous Delivery (CD) was announced in April 2016, there was already talk of MQ as a Service (MQaaS).

As per any major z Systems subsystem, traditionally IBM MQ was managed by a centralized messaging middleware team, collaborating with their Application, Database and Systems Management colleagues.  As per the DevOps methodology, this predictable and centralized approach, does no lend itself to rapid and agile Application Development.  Quite simply an environment management decentralization process is required, to satisfy the ever-increasing speed and diversity of application design and delivery requests.  By definition, MQ seamlessly interfaces with so many technologies, including but not limited to, Amazon Web Services, Docker, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, JBoss, JRE, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Fusion Middleware, OpenStack, Salesforce, Spark, Ubuntu, et al.

The notional concept of MQ as a Service (MQaaS), delivers a capability to implement self-service portals, allowing Application Developers and their interconnected Line of Business (LOB) personnel to drive changes to the messaging ecosystem.  These changes might range from the creation or deletion of a messaging queue to the provision of a highly available and scalable topology for a new business application.  The DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) philosophy dictates that the traditional centralized messaging middleware team must evolve, reducing human activity, by automating their best practices.  Therefore MQaaS can increase the speed at which the infrastructure team can deliver new MQ infrastructure to their Application Development community, while safeguarding the associated business requirements.

MQ provides a range of control commands and MQ Script Commands (MQSC) to support the creation and management of MQ resources using scripts.  Programmatic resource access is achievable via MQ Programmable Command Format (PCF) messages, once access to a queue manager has been established.  Therefore MQ administrators can create workflows that drive these processes, delivering a self-service interface.  Automation frameworks, such as UrbanCode Deploy (UCD), Chef and Puppet functions can be used to orchestrate administrative operations for MQ, to create and manage entire application or server environments.  Virtual machines, Docker containers, PureApplication System and the MQ Appliance itself can be used alongside automation frameworks to create a flexible and scalable ecosystem, for delivering the MQaaS infrastructure.

Integrating the MQ as a Service concept within your DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management process delivers the following benefits:

  • Development Agility: Devolving traditional MQ administration activities to Application and Line of Business personnel, allows them to directly provision or update the associated messaging resources. This optimizes the overall process, while DevOps processes facilitates the requisite IT organization communication.
  • Process Standardization: Enabling a self-service interface to Application and Line of Business personnel delivers a single entry point for messaging configuration changes. This common interface will leverage from consistent routines and workflows to deploy the necessary changes, enforcing standards and consistency.
  • Personnel Optimization: Self-service interfaces used by Application and Line of Business personnel allow them to focus on core application requirements, primarily messaging and Quality of Service (QoS) related. In such an environment, the background process of performing the change is arbitrary, timely change implementation is the most important factor.
  • Environment Interoperability: An intelligent and automated self-service interface allows for dynamic provisioning of systems and messaging resources for development and testing purposes. This automation can simplify the promotion of changes throughout the testing lifecycle (E.g. Development, Test, Quality Assurance, Production, et al).  As and when required, such automation can provide capacity-on-demand type changes, dynamically scaling an application, as and when required, to satisfy ever-changing and unpredictable business requirements.

In conclusion, DevOps is an all-encompassing framework and one must draw one’s own conclusions as to whether software update frequency timescales will reduce for major subsystems such as CICS, DB2, IMS and even the underlying Operating System itself, namely z/OS.  Conversely, the one major z Systems subsystem with so many interoperability touch points, namely MQ, is the obvious choice for applying DevOps techniques to underlying subsystem software.  For MQ, the use of a Continuous Delivery (CD) software support model safeguards that the latest new function and bug fix capability is delivered in a timely manner for those organizations striving for an agile environment.  Similarly, the consideration of devolving traditional MQ systems administration activities, via intelligent, automated and self-service processes to key Application and Line of Business personnel makes sense, evolving a pseudo MQaaS capability.