BMC AMI DevX is an integrated software platform that provides mainframe development teams with modern Application Development and DevOps capabilities. The solution connects traditional mainframe environments with contemporary development practices through components for source code management, testing, debugging, and analytics.
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Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
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The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
The names may have changed over the years, but anyone who has been around for a while will recognize them. For Software Configuration Management, I have used TSO/ISPF/SCLM, Panvalet, ChangeMan, Librarian, Endevor, and now Code Pipeline. All of them met the basic requirements. …
Optim is more user friendly in how it operates, in my opinion. It's less obtuse to figure out how to extract and mask the data required compared to File-AID. Further, Optim is easier to gather related tables, by far. I do prefer using File-AID via the Topaz GUI much more than …
Puppet has Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform beat on metrics. This isn't a fair comparison due to the agent oriented nature of puppet. Ansible is much smoother to start using and appreciably faster to install, configure and role into small groups of systems. I no longer use …
AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that …
Ansible is agentless and using SSH so sometimes when the SSH is down we are using since Tanium it is agent base app we using Tanium l to get to the serverand before we were using SALT
I think terraform has some overlap with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and what determines which tool would be best will depend on how much can be pushed to the far left vs needing to be flexible or dynamic post deployment
I love these tools! However, my company has not yet transitioned from SCLM to a modern repository, and this is causing most of our developers to remain within TSO for all their development. It's been a slow adoption up to this point, but we are moving toward more modernization this year and next, so with any luck, we'll see usage pick up. Success depends on the speed at which your management is willing to move.
I'm going to say it is best suited for configuration management. Like I said, patching even with security, things of that nature. Probably less suited is hardware management, but Red Hat IBM/IBM has Terraform for that. So it's a trade off.
Code Pipeline: integration of MF and non-MF type of object (COBOL, Java, zosconnect...). Deployment of objects coming from inside and outside the mainframe in the same way.
Workbench for Eclipse: a must-have for working with Code Pipeline and the mainframe in the development context.
Workbench for VS Code: They started developing VSCode, and the plugin works very well. There are a lot of things to add, but it's still very good. Young developers like it!
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
Overall it's good but the new architecture can be complex. Improvements can be made in the Config as Code capabilities for managing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Sometimes it can be difficult for those unfamiliar to understand the relationship between Projects/Credentials/Job Templates, etc.
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
Support has been amazing compared to Optim. Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
The names may have changed over the years, but anyone who has been around for a while will recognize them. For Software Configuration Management, I have used TSO/ISPF/SCLM, Panvalet, ChangeMan, Librarian, Endevor, and now Code Pipeline. All of them met the basic requirements. All of them had their advantages and disadvantages. Code Pipeline, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest in simplicity, completeness, effectiveness, efficiency, and elegance.
As I said earlier, Red Hat Ansible remains a top choice because it is a perfect combination of multiple capabilities. Terraform is good in IAC but not in config automation. Puppet is well-suited for developers, but not for system administrators and infrastructure integrators. OpenShift and Kubernetes are generic automators only.
I can debug (expeditor) much faster and more efficiently. In fact, I was asked yesterday to run their job through Workbench Expeditor. I can also view data movement much better.
Code analysis lets me give a quicker explanation of what a program may do, as it provides a graphical interface showing processing and data movement.
We are still early in our implementation and don't have much yet - but I can say that it has already improved the time it takes to deploy a new virtual server for us, as well as making them more consistent.
In working through what jobs are required, it has really improved the communication between our different teams
