We know that speed and agility are of utmost importance for our clients on their journey to cloud. But what we’ve also heard from them is that they’re looking for an enterprise-wide strategy to provide consistent automation across their hybrid environment — spanning their IT infrastructure, clouds and applications.

The reality of hybrid IT is here. Our clients are looking for solutions that leverage their investments in — and the strengths of — their existing IT infrastructure, clouds and applications in a seamless way. To deliver on this we’re focusing on three areas: developer experience, automation and operations that bring value to our clients no matter where they are on the hybrid IT continuum.

To help make this a reality, today IBM announced the availability of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, enabling Ansible users to automate IBM Z applications and IT infrastructure. The Certified Content will be available in Automation Hub, with an upstream open source version offered on Ansible Galaxy. This means that no matter what mix of infrastructure our clients are working with, IBM is bringing automation for IBM Z into the fold to help you manage across your hybrid environment through a single control panel.

Ansible functionality for z/OS will empower IBM Z clients to simplify configuration and access of resources, leverage existing automation and streamline automation of operations using the same technology stack that they can use across their entire enterprise. Delivered as a fully supported enterprise-grade solution with Content Collections, Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z provides easy to use automation building blocks that can accelerate the automation of z/OS and z/OS-based software. These initial core collections include connection plugins, action plugins, modules and a sample playbook to automate tasks for z/OS such as creating data sets, retrieving job output and submitting jobs.

Over the last several months, we’ve made significant strides to improve the developer experience by bringing DevOps and industry-standard tools like Git and Jenkins to the platform. We’ve announced IBM Z Open Editor, IBM Developer for z/OS V14.2.1, and, of course, we are a founding member of Zowe™. In February we announced the availability of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z, which enables developers to run, build, manage and modernize cloud native workloads on their choice of architecture.

And with today’s announcement, we’re taking the next step toward this commitment. For developers and operations, Ansible allows them to break down traditional internal and historical technology silos to centralize automation — all while leveraging the performance, scale, control and security provided by IBM Z. This brings the best of both worlds together with a practical and more economical solution. We’re excited about this important step both for our clients, and for our shared mission with Red Hat to provide a flexible, open and secured enterprise platform for mission-critical workloads.

For more information on Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z visit:

Github to join the open source community, see source code and documentation

Ansible Galaxy to get started with the ibm.ibm_zos_core Ansible Collection

Ansible Automation Hub: Now Ansible Automation Platform subscribers can get started with Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z.

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