NonStop Technical Boot Camp – San Francisco

Software Development has had very few paradigm shifts on NonStop since 1978 when TAL and FUP DUP were the things. At TBC this year, we saw a strong focus on DevOps, which represents a new way of doing business to some, but truly a culmination of where we have been going for decades: strong auditable processes making our operations bullet proof.

A solution which caught a lot of attention this year was NSGit – which is the NonStop GUARDIAN front-end for the Git environment.  During the Pre-conference Seminar, Randall Becker presented NSGit and how Software Configuration Management (SCM) works, and attendees learned that code management in their Enterprise can now include the NonStop, and go beyond the reach of the OSS subsystem, all way to include GUARDIAN OS. NSGit came out of efforts Randall and others have made achieve a stable and fully capable of port of git to the OSS environment, allowing NonStop to finally participate in the global DevOps ecosystem.

A core benefit git brings to our community is the ability to transfer code and audit metadata between external entities, including NonStop Partners and Open Source providers, our development machines, QA systems, and production environments, without the loss of fidelity – meaning that everything is fully audited, no matter where it originated or was modified. Git also can track and transmit changes back from production, so in situ fixes never get lost.

Where NSGit comes in, is to bring the power of Git to GUARDIAN artifacts – you see, git only works on text files. NSGit knows about the entire suite of what you need to deploy to production, testing and deployment scripts can now integrate with GUARDIAN. That means that you do not have to spend time and money and effort moving and converting and loading files from various forms just for GUARDIAN. Another cool feature Randall presented was showing how file names in GUARDIAN and OSS can be mapped easily and shared with world-class git servers like GitHub Enterprise and BitBucket Server and with HPE’S NSDEE workstation development app. You can now realize the benefits of NonStop truly being a fully integrated part of your enterprise.

In his DevOps talk on Tuesday, Randall also discussed the DevOps principles if how the same tools should be used in production and development. This includes monitoring aspects of production environment changes using SCM tools, where NSGit can also help. If as yet you missed the news as published in the November, 2017 issue of NonStop Insider, comForte provides a full slate of sessions for 2017 NonStop Technical Boot Camp, “comForte and Nexbridge are working closely together to enable companies interested in NSGit the opportunity to explore options.” This means that if you want to know more about this topic you can also reach out to your contacts at comForte.

NSGit may become a hot product in 2018, as many companies are, or have standardized their SCM with Git in their Enterprise. NSGit achieves a few key goals for organizations: integration of GUARDIAN into the Enterprise DevOps community to use automation tools like Jenkins and Ansible; sharing of GUARDIAN sources, objects, and data with other platforms; audit of production environment changes; and facilitating change tracking no matter where it is made throughout the enterprise.

Sometimes products do come along that change everything. NSGit and git may really breathe new life into our development and operations teams.

Randall Backer | ITUGLIB Engineering Team | Nexbridge Inc.

© 2017 – Randall S. Becker, All Rights Reserved.