Why Anytime is the Right Time for z/OS Training

The mainframe industry is in a continual state of evolution, requiring ongoing training and development for new professionals. Trainers, mentors, team leaders, and department managers all need reliable access to mainframe resources to ensure their teams are equipped with up-to-date skills and knowledge. As new talent enters the field, the necessity for accessible and effective training has become more pressing than ever.

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The Mainframe Delivery Revolution Continues

Last year, the PopUp Mainframe team was delighted to attend, present, and exhibit at the GSE UK Conference 2024 – the region’s biggest and best mainframe community event. Rubbing shoulders with industry luminaries, technical experts, household name organizations, it was a fantastic experience. And this year, with a fresh new title of GS UK 2025, the conference looks set to be one of the best ever – we look forward to attending another fantastic event!

Here’s a quick recap of why the PopUp Mainframe team value the conference so much.  

The need for speed – a mainframe market requirement

Mainframes remain the mainstay of enterprise computing. Industry reports (including our own from earlier this year) indicate continued reliance upon IBM mainframes across a variety of sectors, at some of the world’s largest and most successful organizations. Often part of a hybrid IT strategy nowadays, the IBM mainframe remains a central component of the organizational infrastructure, the applications it houses business critical in nature.

As important as it is, issues blight the mainframe environment, and none more so than the problem with bottlenecks (also reported in our survey). Mainframe delivery teams often suffer from the shortage of non-production environments for development, test, research, and training, impacting their ability to deliver as fast as the business would like.

Even with the advent of DevOps style tooling on the mainframe, the resource availability restrictions make genuine acceleration of delivery very tough.

Flexible mainframe delivery to match your imagination

We spoke last year of PopUp Mainframe’s breakthrough approach to providing readily-available, virtual mainframe environments to anyone who needs access, whenever they need it. PopUp Mainframe can figuratively pop-up in minutes to provide ready access for situations that demand it – scaling up test environment availability to run some resource-intensive or multi-user testing, to enable dev teams to collaborate on complex merges, to enable system administrators to validate fixes across different versions of the same sub-system, to offer ready access to new trainees before they ‘go live’ with their own LPAR access, to support an urgent application fix to commence while the usual LPAR is down for maintenance. The list goes on.

We were grateful for being invited to speak and for the lively discussion from the audience.

Increased PopUp Capability On Show

Since last year, we’ve released an updated product, widened the scope of our deployment offering to take in the IFL and LinuxONE, and we’ve added some key new capabilities to the product line.

And we’re pleased to return to the conference (now renamed GS UK) to widen the scope of our discussions based on these recent innovations. Join us to learn more about our latest innovations on Linux, with Ansible playbooks, with our new “FastTrack” facility, using mainframe open-source technology, and more.

Our busy conference speaking agenda looks like this.

Monday 3rd November

11am – More Horses! Low Linux on Z speeds up mainframe change

2.30pm – Open-Source Mainframe DevOps demonstration

3.45pm – Automate the heck out of every LPAR (using Ansible playbooks)

Tuesday 4th November

3.30pm – Mainframe IT Skills Overview – part of the WAVEZ 101 Track

4.45pm – Platform Engineering – a real-world use case

Wednesday 5th November

Midday – Market Survey Findings RoundTable (Executive Track – Invitation Only)

The full conference agenda is here.

Team Time

This is a real community show, and the attendee list reads like a who’s who in the UK mainframe world. From the major mainframe vendors such as IBM, Broadcom and BMC, to the crucial resellers, consultancies and service providers like TES Enterprise Solutions and Vertali, to the press presence of Planet Mainframe, to the notable end user organizations present, to the fantastic volunteers at the Open Mainframe Project, there’s an insightful, informative, conversation to be had every hour of the day.

Join Us

The mainframe community has redoubled its efforts in the last few years to engage more proactively and open its doors to the curious, and the Whittlebury Park conference is a real fixture of the mainframe community calendar.

Please make time to join us at one of our sessions or come and chat to us on the Expo floor (we’ll be hanging out with our partners, TES Enterprise Solutions at their booth).

We hope to see you there. If you haven’t yet registered – go here.

Further Reading For more information on how PopUp Mainframe can help revolutionize mainframe delivery in your organization, take a look at the web site, including this list of recent press articles.

Mainframe Innovation Pops Up in Ohio

The PopUp Mainframe team was recently in the mighty Midwest, taking part in both the illustrious SHARE conference, and the TechFieldDay Extra event, in Cleveland, Ohio. In this blog we summarise CEO Gary Thornhill’s presentation.

Introduction

As data from our 2025 mainframe market survey shows, mainframe delivery cycles are often hampered by bottlenecks in operational processes. Using PopUp Mainframe, these bottlenecks can be beaten, enabling mainframe teams to revolutionise mainframe delivery.

Our conference presentationsoutlined our uniquely rapid and flexible approach to supporting faster mainframe delivery. To do this, we introduced some of the latest capabilities of the PopUp Mainframe solution:

  • Full support of a modern mainframe CI/CD pipeline, using – in this case – IBM and open-source DevOps tools
  • The choice of Linux on Z or the cloud for deployment
  • The ability to invoke and shut down virtual mainframes in minutes
  • The facility to save, reset, and shareinstances of the PopUp Mainframe environment using the new ‘FastTrack’ capability
  • Integration with 3rd party data masking products for data compliance
  • The inclusion of Ansible playbooks for streamlined administration

Our Demo Scenario

In our presentation, we used a demo scenario, featuring a simple mainframe application, “NextGen Bank”, with a web-based UI, z/OS Connect to call the backend, atypical mix of COBOL, CICS, and Db2. The backend would ordinarily be a production LPAR on a physical mainframe – in our demo we ran it in a PopUp Mainframe environment, as a test version.

Invoking PopUp Mainframe X and Z Editions

There are two editions of the product – X Edition, for x86 hardware and the cloud, and the Z Edition, running on Linux on Z. Both provide a virtual, on-demand z/OS environment on-demand, only the underlying hardware changes.

You can invoke either in a few minutes.

Once the PopUp Mainframe product (or “PopUp”) is available, you can populate it with our choice of applications and data – our own unique dev/test environment, including compliant/masked data – to perform our task. This was totally configurable each time, of course.

Another key capability of a PopUp is to allow users to take a snapshot of the z/OS environment and, at any time, return to any of the snapshots. This meansyou can reset to a previous state anytime, perfect for testing out new features or upgrades. So, before we made a code change requested by the customer, we took a snapshot of this PopUp to save a ‘before’ state.

Implementing an Application Change under PopUp Mainframe

Thesample Next Gen Bank application was originally showing the customer transaction history in ascending date order, oldest first. For our demo, we have received a new change request, from the business, asking to see the most recent transaction at the top, which means the transaction history needed to be sorted in descending order.

In our example, the development process is a relatively straightforward CI/CD pipeline, featuring a standard IDE to do the development, then specific build and unit test steps, before deploying the code and running system tests. Of course, the stages, and the choice of tools, crucially, is completely flexible: PopUp supports all approaches.

Starting with the code change, in this scenario the developer checked out the code from the GitHub repository using VS Code, modified the query to retrieve the rows in descending order, and committed and pushed the code back to the GitHub repository. The CI/CD pipeline was automatically triggered by the code check-in. This pipeline used GitHub Actions, which, in this example, built the code using the IBM DBB facility, then conducted unit tests using the open-source tool COBOL-CHECK, and pushed the compiled binaries into an artefact repository, Artifactory. These binaries were then deployed onto a different z/OS instance using IBM’s deployment facility, Wazideploy, where integration tests were performed using the Galasa open-source testing framework.

Mainframe application processes are not always simple or successful.So, in our example, the testing reports an error. The application showed that the balances were now blank. As it turned out, the developer had forgotten another relevant change.

In situations like this, it is useful torevert to a previous working state and restart.

The PopUp Mainframe FastTrack capability reset our environment to the snapshot taken before we started the code change. With the environment quickly restored, the developer could isolate and fix the logic error.

With the code fixed (using the IDZ product this time – PopUp Mainframe supports your choice of IDE),the pipeline was this time successful.

Our simple example illustrates an environment that is productive, flexible, and scalable.

Operational Efficiency

A further new capability was the inclusion of pre-installed Ansible playbooks to assist with the administration of the PopUp environment. We showed one such playbook example to support adding and removing users within one PopUp instance without the reliance on, say, a RACF administrator.

Another important facet of a PopUp is that it can be shut down immediately –meaning no environments left running idle, and no wasted resources. As customers have told us, this is perfect for helping meetIT sustainability objectives.

Summary

Our presentations underscored our vision to revolutionize mainframe delivery by dramaticallyaccelerating the mainframe delivery process.

As we demonstrated, from a developer making a code change, committing to GitHub, then sequencing build, unit testing, deployment, and integration testing using a variety of 3rd party and open-source tools, resetting to a previous state, this all happens in the instantly available, flexible PopUp Mainframe environment.

Customers have reported up to a 400% increase in mainframe deliveries made, a reduction in the average time taken to deliver, significant sustainability metric gains by being able to switch off unused resources, and greater flexibility and responsiveness.

Thanks

Our thanks go to the fantastic Tech Field Day team and the panel of experts for their time and insights, and to the wider SHARE organization for their support.

Further Information

Watch the recording of our session via the Tech Field Day SHARE 2025 page

Keeping up to date – PopUp Mainframe Newsletter

We have just sent out our latest newsletter to hundreds of subscribers. In case you missed it, we’ve included a copy of the key points below. Contact us if you want to sign-up at the bottom of the page to receive future news from us!

PopUp Mainframe Newsletter

Greetings from PopUp Mainframe!

Where has the year gone? If, like us, you’ve been busy, it is sometimes useful to take a step back and look at the big events of the recent past. Allow us to catch you up with this quick summary of what we’ve been doing lately.

New Product Release

We are proud to announce our latest product releases are now available. PopUp Mainframe Z Edition and PopUp Mainframe X Edition introduce greater choice and flexibility for customers looking to accelerate mainframe delivery. For more information on the release, visit this page

Market Survey

We are delighted to share our new mainframe market survey. Covering a range of topics relevant to the mainframe market such as environment access, attitudes towards Linux, IT skills, tools usage, sustainability, delivery velocity, risk management and more, it is a must read for decision makers. To download the full report and related articles, head to this page.

Coming Soon! Join Us Live and Beat Those Bottlenecks

We are teaming up with industry analysts Futurum Group for a special webinar on June 18th, hosted by DevOps.com. We’ll be discussing our new market survey, key challenges facing mainframe leaders today, and our revolutionary approach to mainframe delivery. Register here for “Beating the Bottlenecks”.

Read all about it

Explore the PopUp Mainframe blog for insights on important mainframe delivery topics like DevOps, cost management, market trends, risk avoidance, and more.

And don’t forget to connect with PopUp Mainframe on LinkedIn, too.

Best wishes from the PopUp Mainframe team!