Gary Thornhill, PopUp founder and CEO, had the privilege of presenting a fully featured PopUp demo to a group of mainframe and tech enthusiasts at Tech Field Day at SHARE Kansas City, 2024.
The delegates came from a wide range of backgrounds including appdev, mainframe education, security, DevOps, mainframe services, and Open Mainframe Project.
“What is PopUp? Well, we can popup a full mainframe platform in under 10 minutes, in the cloud or on prem.
We are proud that PopUp runs on IBM zD&T under the covers – tried and true industry-leading z/OS virtualisation software.”
Welcome to the Wonderful World of PopUp Mainframe!
PopUp was born out of a direct need to provide customers with mainframe environments so they can action the mainframe transformations they desire.
PopUp is pipeline-ready, and can be fully administered in a distributed way, using APIs to spawn, clone, and tear down a PopUp just like other virtual machines.
Using PopUp to deploy and test code quickly, test the latest security features, meet regulatory requirements, and test upgrades of Z can liberate your teams to achieve their goals more quickly than before.
Modern mainframes are incredibly efficient, cost effective, and provide better per-core performance than the alternatives.* Migrating workloads away from the mainframe requires careful consideration.
Using PopUp to augment your physical mainframe by enabling faster, cheaper testing on ephemeral environments is a fast track to modernising your mainframe processes and continuing to reap the benefits of the physical mainframe.
Gary discussed the key features of PopUp. Some of the call out points are:
PopUp provides system and helper utilities. For example, to help automate archiving, and CPU utilisation monitoring to assist in capacity management.
We have extended the Delphix Continuous Compliance engine to enable masking of ANY mainframe data sourcein a consistent, robust fashion across the entire organisational data estate, maintaining referential integrity across all systems, whether they be mainframe or distributed.
Using PopUp & Delphix for Data masking
PopUp Integrates fully with Delphix to utilise the industry-leading data masking capabilities against mainframe data.
Data can be masked on the physical mainframe, or on the PopUp, depending on your needs. Then we use Delphix Continuous Data self-service portal to provision compliant copies.
“Being able to rewind a full production-like mainframe environment at the touch of a button is absolutely massive for productivity and cutting time-to-market.
Marty McFly would be right at home with the 4D mainframe. Think of it as the ‘undo’ button for a mainframe.”
PopUp is a great way to train people new to the mainframe, as PopUp is a disposable, completely isolated environment with zero risk to the physical mainframe – perfect for training.
“With PopUp everyone is welcome and able to be productive with tools of their choice.”
Use cases on the PopUp are only limited to your imagination
Just some use cases for a dedicated mainframe environment:
Development
Use with a desktop IDE
All aspects of Testing including Regression testing against mainframe
Software evaluation
R&D
Proof of concept development
Offshore or 3rd party environment
Training environment
Use of a mainframe data “gold copy” on demand across the enterprise
Checkpoint, forward and rewind data
What we’ve all been waiting for… the demo!
Gary’s demo covered:
Spinning up a PopUp Mainframe in the cloud through the Azure MarketPlace. The PopUp can be ready to go in 6-8 minutes
Deploying and configuring an application using a GitHub Actions pipeline (covering tasks which would usually be done by a sysprog, automated testing of the UI through Selenium)
Masking the sensitive data through Delphix Continuous Compliance
Creating the baseline ‘Gold copy’ PopUp containing the masked data and full application
Enabling easy creation of on-demand virtualized PopUp instances with fast, efficient checkpointing
Provisioning compliant dev environment through the Delphix self-service portal
Developer commits code change into Git, pipeline is kicked off to generate, test and deploy the change onto a PopUp, then do UI testing
Failure of automated UI testing
Rewinding the entire PopUp environment back to the previous version (not just the data, the entire app) through the self-service Delphix portal
How a developer can understand what went wrong and fix it without any environment overheads
Some great questions from the audience…
Cameron asked if we need to install DB2. Answer: No, DB2, CICS, MQ, IMS and other apps come out of the box with PopUp and are available in 10 minutes.
Mark asked if there is an option for customers who can’t move unmasked data off the mainframe. Answer: Yes, masking can be done on the physical mainframe, and only the masked data ported onto the PopUp.
“Using PopUp allows organisations to easily start doing DevOps and automation on the mainframe in exactly the same way they do for their distributed applications today.”
Thanks to all the fabulous delegates who attended and joined in the conversation with energy and insight.
What a great experience! Thanks to the Tech Field Day team, in particular Stephen Foskett, for running such a great session.
The UK PopUp team (or “PopStars” as we call ourselves) attended the GSE conference at Whittlebury Park from 30th Oct – 2nd Nov 2023. It was a very well-attended event, brimming with mainframe enthusiasts, and copious deep discussions on all aspects of mainframe.
Thank you to the organisers, it was well run and enjoyed by all.
Legal & General – PopUp Mainframe driving Pensions Application Transformation
There were many highs across the four day event – the best was probably our founder, Gary Thornhill, joining one of our customers on stage to present their story.
Vamsi Bhogireddy and Javeed Miyandad from L&G shared how they transformed their pensions application with the developer experience at the heart of the project.
Using PopUp Mainframe to provide ephemeral z/OS instances in Azure, they reduced development cycle times with purpose-built, pre-configured tooling, driving pipeline automation and agility… whilst increasing the quality of deliverables.
What else we got up to
The team were joined by a brand new addition to the PopUp team – ‘mini PopStars’ in the form of lego minifigures.
The ‘mini PopStars’ got to meet their idol – the human-sized lego z16.
The PopUp team got up close and personal with a Formula 1 car.
We even let the ‘mini PopStars’ have a go at driving!
Our PopUp pants were a big hit and were snapped up quickly. If you missed out on a pair this time, come along to a future event for some more unique merchandise.
GSE attendees were lucky to be the first people to get their hands on our brand new PopUp Handbook.
The Handbook is your guide to getting the most from PopUp on your mainframe modernisation journey. It covers the future of mainframe, how to eat the elephant of mainframe modernisation, shift left testing, increasing agility, accelerating batch testing and many more topics.
Read The PopUp Handbook here. If you want your own copy, join us at one of our upcoming events.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Follow us on LinkedIn
The UK PopUp team 
Vamsi Bhogireddy and Javeed Miyandad from L&G shared how they transformed their pensions application with the developer experience at the heart of the project.
Using PopUp Mainframe to provide ephemeral z/OS instances in 
GSE attendees were lucky to be the first people to get their hands on our brand new