2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
It was a Blue and Stormy Green Night …
Nexbridge
DanIf you have never seen the early evening sky in autumn in Ontario, you are missing quite the experience. The depth of the blue is breathtaking. Just after the sun dips below the horizon, the sky goes green, like a rectangle we now see on PDFs and PowerPoints done by our favourite salespeople. The blue towards the east is deep and contrasts the greens toward the west. If you are lucky, a brief flash of inspiration will hit you as the zodiac lights make their elusive show. Lightning struct last September for me and my team as we pondered the NSGit roadmap.
We live and work in a world of falling silos. Where what was historically isolated is now forced, almost viscerally through staff reductions, retirements, budget cuts, but mostly by the continuing pressure to deliver features quickly, to come together in some unified way. Our talks of what was coming from the NSGit roadmap seemed to speak to problems on another silo experiencing angst – our IBM cousins. The more we explored where NSGit was going, the more the solutions kept resonating on z/OS. And then the flash! Or maybe it was portability planning we did a year before. Or the major ask we had from customers who kept wanting NSGit to run anywhere.
Swipe left a year and we had NSGit in a position where our compatibility layer worked under GCC. Remember the A.I. presentations? And on October 1st we took delivery, virtually, of our z/OS machine. Still driven a lot by heroics, we now have NSGit supporting MVS. It’s called Ingot/MVS if you’re interested and its customer ready. But the kicker is that both remaining major silos in information technology can now be fully integrated into the rest of the world.
In a sense, we have gone back to our roots, where NonStop and MVS made up the first real hybrid environments, driving our ATMs and POS devices from NonStop, and keeping the accounts current on our IBM mainframes. The difference is that now, finally, after decades of trying, our hybrid solutions can be managed together in our local cloud using the industry standard git ecosystem.
As I write this, the sun just blazed out into clear skies after a serious winter storm. It feels like we are on an upswing of opportunity and hope, where we can now do anything from anywhere, leverage people to work flexibly without being restricted to silos, since the processes for doing anything and delivering everything are now the same. Isn’t this the core of what DevOps offers? So what’s holding you back?
Randall Becker is the brains behind NSGit and also maintains the git port for NonStop H/J and L-series operating systems at ITUGLIB. He has designed the DevOps process structure for ITUGLIB and many NonStop shops to improve time to market delivery.