DevOps - Fast lifecycle management of workflow definitions

10/17/2017

In today’s fast-changing IT world, companies across all industries base their ability to be agile and efficient on a successful collaboration between their developers and their operational teams. The trend has gone by the name of DevOps that clearly highlights how the two departments need to engage in a constant dialog.

On the developers’ side, IT workers are getting more and more involved on all aspects of IT operational activities with a growing focus on automation.

It is very important for a Workload Automation tool to allow developers to deploy jobs and job workflows, change production plans, and even design workflows. Moreover, developers need to manage the workflow definitions within a DevOps process along with the application source code using the same tools they are used to working with.

In the DevOps area, a new enhancement has been released with Workload Scheduler 9.4 FP1 and Workload Scheduler for z/OS SPE 9.3.0.7 (APAR PI79321) that enables developers to design workflows, run tests in their development environment and automate the deployment of the workflow definitions to Q&A or Production environments.

The implementation of the scenario is based on the possibility to save the workflow definitions in a text-based representation.

The format used for this purpose is the WAT (Workload Application Template) for distributed platform and the WAPL (Workload Automation Programming Language) for the mainframe.

Developers certainly use a source code management tool for the applications’ source code, for example ClearCase, RTC or GIT. The new feature enables the possibility to export the workflow definitions in a text format and save them in any source code management tool.

How can a developer manage his workflow definitions?

Developers can define the job stream to schedule the execution of the applications they have developed from the Workload Designer component of the Dynamic Workload Console, for example using the new Graphical View.

The second step for developers is to test the new job stream. Within the Workload Designer, it is now possible to submit the job stream into the Current Plan of the development environment.

When the test is successfully completed developers can download the job stream definition...

...and after that import the definitions into the development workbench.

Developers are finally able to deliver the workload definitions along with the applications artifacts from the development workbench to the source code management tool.

Automating the workflow definitions deployment

Now it is time to deploy the workflow definitions along with the applications scheduled to a Q&A and later to the Production environments. Both on distributed and on mainframe tools are available to allow an easy import/export of the workload definitions, so writing scripts or JCLs to automate the deployment through commands or REST APIs becomes very simple.

Nevertheless, we provide an out-of-the-box solution for customers who run the IBM UrbanCode Deploy product in their environment. The new Workload Automation plug in for IBM UrbanCode Deploy delivered with Workload Scheduler 9.4 FP1 allows to customize very efficiently the automated deployment of the workflow definitions. The Workload Automation plug in also allows to define environment properties that map automatically the workflow definitions to the target systems.

Here is the video that describes the Workload Automation plug in for IBM UrbanCode Deploy.

With the new Workload Automation plug in for IBM UrbanCode Deploy, developers can rely on an automated deployment process that includes applications, scripts or JCLs and the scheduling workflows.

Marco CARDELLI
Workload Automation Offering Manager at HCL
Workload Automation

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