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.
Watch this webinar with PopUp’s Gary Thornhill and Muthiah Maruthappan.
The Billing System transformation programme at National Grid was severely hampered by mainframe test environment unavailability across multiple systems.
Dev & Test mainframe environments were already close to capacity, so mainframe modernisation initiatives required acquiring expensive new hardware. One mainframe modernisation proof of concept (using z/OS Connect to improve mainframe access) could not proceed without additional environments.
National Grid’s cloud-first policy fuelled the desire to:
create dev and test environments in the cloud
offer self-service
remove third-party dependency
improve agility with on-demand access
and reduce cost
The new self-service capability has transformed National Grid’s ability to deliver transformative change across billing systems. Using Delphix and PopUp Mainframe running on Azure, National Grid accelerated their projects. The company is now planning the next stage of their mainframe modernisation: spinning up new mainframe environments with the latest secured data using automation pipelines in minutes.
Delphix and PopUp on Azure empowered National Grid with autonomy over their mainframe systems and the ability to increase productivity. National Grid can now immediately innovate to solve business problems using ephemeral mainframe environments spun up on demand. They also plan to redevelop some of their legacy .NET processes using modern tooling.
PopUp Mainframe’s Gary Thornhill joins the Microsoft Cloud team to discuss how to get more from an existing mainframe.
They discuss pragmatic options to:
improve costs
refine a business process
creating value from data
evolving DevOps
Gary talks about how PopUp can support mainframe businesses on their journey to delivering changes faster, cheaper and better using on-demand environments.
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