Blogs

My Summer on Broadcom's Watchtower: Monitoring a Monitor

By Carter Frank posted 3 days ago
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My Summer on Broadcom's Watchtower: Monitoring a Monitor I had the amazing opportunity this summer to join the Broadcom Mainframe AIOps value stream to work on Watchtower™—an observability platform that helps users monitor the health and behavior of mainframe environments through real-time insights. My summer project focused on Watchtower’s self-observability and building a health-checking tool to monitor and assess Watchtower’s internal state. The goal - prototype and begin productizing a full-stack application that surfaces meaningful metrics, performance bottlenecks, and Kubernetes-level events. The result empowers internal developers with faster ...
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My Broadcom Experience: Making Testing Easier

By Jonathan Castro posted 3 days ago
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Hi, I'm Jonathan Castro — a computer science graduate from Northern Illinois University. This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to join Broadcom as a Next-Gen Mainframer on the AAM Team in the Lisle office. It has been an amazing learning experience—one that gave me hands-on exposure to real-world cybersecurity challenges. This project not only helped me sharpen my technical skills, but also allowed me to collaborate with incredible people and deepen my understanding of industry best practices in an agile environment. My Project: Automating R_FACTOR Testing Ever heard of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)? It’s essential for modern security—requiring ...
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Mainframe DevOps: My Summer in Broadcom's Gen Team

By Saishravan Muthukrishnan posted 4 days ago
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This summer, I had the opportunity to join the Gen Product team within Broadcom’s Mainframe Division as a summer Next-Gen Mainframer. Gen is a tool that provides a unified environment for developing and maintaining large-scale applications across multiple platforms. During my time here, I worked on modernizing Gen’s application deployment process by building a command-line utility called gendeploycli . This tool automates the deployment of Gen applications in containerized environments — equipping Gen to make another step forward in the modern DevOps adoption journey. Through this project, I gained experience with the Go programming language, collaborated ...
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My Summer on Broadcom’s Mainframe Resource Intelligence Team

By Kevin Aguirre posted 4 days ago
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This summer, I had the opportunity to join Broadcom’s MRI ( Mainframe Resource Intelligence ) team as a summer Next-Gen Mainframer. Much like a medical MRI helps diagnose health issues, Broadcom’s MRI tool gives businesses and IT leaders deep insights into their mainframe systems—insights that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Customers who use MRI can gain access to a variety of assessments and reports, including hardware analysis, security audits, and execution metrics. And, perhaps most impressively, as a Beyond Code offering, MRI is available at no cost to Broadcom customers. Understanding how these entitlements are used is critical; usage ...
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Broadcom Service Virtualization – Helping Dev Teams Test Mainframe and Distributed Systems Faster and Safer, by Uttam Anand

By Pamela Deason posted 5 days ago
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Broadcom Service Virtualization – Helping Dev Teams Test Mainframe and Distributed Systems Faster and Safer By Uttam Anand Mainframe application testing is essential to ensure the reliability, performance, and security of systems that support critical business functions across sectors such as banking, healthcare, insurance, and travel. These systems process large volumes of transactions and sensitive data, making rigorous testing vital to prevent downtime, data breaches, and system failures. Given their complexity and integration with both legacy and modern technologies, thorough testing is necessary to verify that updates, migrations, or new features ...
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My Summer on Broadcom's Support Team

By Michael Sensenbrenner posted 5 days ago
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This summer, I had the opportunity to work on the Support Team at Broadcom. In my first week, I met the entire team and quickly began shadowing Support Engineers to learn what their daily responsibilities looked like. They introduced me to a web-based tool called Wolken, which they use to manage support cases, customer information, and case statuses. While observing how they completed and closed cases, I noticed some inefficiencies in their workflow. Although they used Wolken to communicate with customers, they often had to leave the platform to search for the information they needed to resolve the case. To help streamline their workflow and ...
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A Summer That Shaped My Career: My Experience at Broadcom

By Victor Taiwo posted 5 days ago
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Working at Broadcom this summer was an incredible experience, one that significantly shaped my career growth and introduced me to a culture where collaboration is deeply embedded in the software we build. The professionalism and work ethic of the people here left a lasting impression on me. Everyone I encountered was welcoming, especially toward newer team members like myself, offering guidance on how to navigate the environment and make the most of the opportunity. My team was nothing short of exceptional. Watching them manage multiple projects with such grace and effectiveness was inspiring. Every day brought measurable progress, and I found myself constantly ...
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A Summer to Remember: My Experience with The Open Mainframe Project

By Peizhao Mei posted 6 days ago
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Last summer, I worked on the Zowe Python SDK project with the Zowe team under the Open Mainframe Project at Broadcom’s Pittsburgh office. This summer, I rejoined the team to contribute further on a different project. Arriving in May, I felt a mix of excitement and anticipation—eager to build on my prior experience and dive once again into the world of mainframe development. Just like last time, the team’s warm welcome and collaborative spirit set the tone for an engaging and intensive 12 week journey. What I Focused On My work this summer centered on Zowe Native Proto, an open-source, SSH-based protocol designed to expose z/OS operations with minimal ...
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Next-Gen Mainframing: Making Testing 10x Better

By Jeffrey Wong posted 6 days ago
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Hi, I’m Jeff Wong—a computer engineering graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After an incredible summer with the z/Raiders team last year, this marks my second time working as a Next-Gen Mainframer—again under Broadcom’s MSD Data Management Team. This summer, I joined the Pioneers, a team focused on making database administration on the mainframe seamless. My role? Use modern tools to accelerate that mission by a factor of ten. Project Overview My project focused on developing and integrating automated tests for RC/Compare for Db2 for z/OS, a Broadcom tool that runs under ISPF (Interactive System Productivity Facility). ...
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My Summer Experience with Broadcom Mainframe

By Sparsh Mathur posted 7 days ago
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My Summer Experience with Broadcom Mainframe This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work with Broadcom’s Mainframe Division, specifically with the Precision SDK teams, including Dashboard and Core SDK. As it was my first experience with a summer-long position, I wasn’t sure what to expect—but any uncertainty quickly disappeared once I dove into my project. The Problem: Visual Defects Hurt User Trust Visual bugs are more than cosmetic—they erode customer trust. In fact, 88% of users say they’re unlikely to return after a poor experience. At present, Precision’s visual checks are done manually. This process is time-consuming, costly, ...
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My Broadcom Summer Experience as a UI Developer

By Rabab Raza posted 9 days ago
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This summer, I had the opportunity to be part of Broadcom’s Summer Worker Program as a User Interface Developer. From day one, I knew I was going to learn a lot—but I didn’t realize just how much I would grow, not only as a developer, but also as a teammate, communicator, and contributor. Diving In: Understanding the Problem I joined the Datacom team, where I was introduced to a powerful product designed to provide insights into query performance across large-scale database environments. While the backend team focused on core logic and infrastructure, my responsibility centered on how users—primarily DBAs—interact with this data to ensure a helpful and ...
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Mainframe DevOps: My Summer On Broadcom’s Gen Team

By Saishravan Muthukrishnan posted 9 days ago
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This summer, I had the opportunity to join the the Gen Product Team within Broadcom’s Mainframe Division as a summer Next-Gen Mainframer. Gen is a tool that provides a unified environment for developing and maintaining large-scale applications across multiple platforms. During my time here, I worked on modernizing Gen’s application deployment process by building a command-line utility called gendeploycli . This tool automates the deployment of Gen applications in containerized environments—equipping Gen to make another step forward in the modern DevOps adoption journey. Through this project, I gained experience with the Go programming language, collaborated ...
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Stepping Into Metal C: My Summer With Broadcom

By Kaylyn King posted 9 days ago
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This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to join the Datacom team at Broadcom and work on a unique challenge: transitioning an existing assembly program to Metal C. While I had prior experience with C, C++, and some exposure to assembly in university, this was my first time diving into mainframe programming. The experience pushed me out of my comfort zone—and ended up being one of the most rewarding projects of my career so far. Background: What Is Metal C? IBM Metal C is a variant of the C programming language designed for low-level, system-level development on mainframes. It behaves like traditional C but allows direct manipulation of hardware via ...
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My Journey with Advanced Authentication and Mainframe Security

By Milad Jizan posted 9 days ago
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My Journey with Advanced Authentication and Mainframe Security Hi, my name is MJ. As a Next-Gen Mainframer and computer science graduate from Northern Illinois University, I had the incredible opportunity this summer to contribute to cutting-edge mainframe security on the Advanced Authentication Method (AAM) QA Automation Team at Broadcom. This summer work deepened my technical knowledge and showed me how modern development practices can transform the way we test legacy systems. Mainframes are the backbone of enterprise computing, powering critical industries like finance, healthcare, transportation, and telecommunications. As cyber threats ...
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Automating the BlackDuck Process: My Summer at Broadcom

By Aima Salman posted 9 days ago
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This summer, I had the exciting opportunity to work as a Software Engineer Summer Worker at Broadcom’s Plano, TX office. It was a hands-on, immersive experience that gave me invaluable exposure to real-world software development challenges. Not only did I sharpen my technical skills and broaden my understanding of industry best practices, but I also made lasting connections with a great team. The Problem: Manual, Time-Consuming Vulnerability Triage At the core of my time with Broadcom this summer was a project focused on automating the triage of security vulnerabilities flagged in third-party components used in Broadcom’s applications. ...
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From 3270 to Intuitive GUI: My Summer as a Next-Gen Mainframer

By Ritthikha Ragavan posted 10 days ago
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The Mission: Simplifying Mainframe Security This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work at the Lisle office as a Next-Gen Mainframer in UX Research. Building on an academic foundation in Cognitive Science focusing on Psychology/HCI and AI from UT Dallas and prior UX research experiences in distributed environments, I was eager to dive into the unique challenges and immense potential of the mainframe world. From day one, the warm welcome and collaborative spirit of the Broadcom team, including UX colleagues, set the stage for an immersive and impactful twelve-week journey. The mission this summer? To contribute to making the mainframe experience ...
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QA Automation in Agile Development: My Summer Experience as a Broadcom Mainframer

By Thomas England posted 10 days ago
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As a Next-Gen Mainframer, I’ve always realized the importance of Quality Assurance (QA) as an integral part of any development process. The phrase “Customers don’t want to be treated as QA” couldn’t be more impactful and imperative; however, developers are human, after all, and they can sometimes overlook steps within this crucial task. In any product, especially a complex one, developers cannot plan for every possible issue that may arise after its release. The obvious answer to this problem involves thorough testing, but this answer raises another question: how comprehensive should this testing be? With time spent in the testing phase as the investment, ...
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Grab Now, Decrypt Later by Geoff Duck

By Pamela Deason posted 12 days ago
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The Role of Encryption in Secure Communication One of the foundational principles of data security is encryption. Using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), two parties can establish a trust relationship that ensures the confidentiality and integrity of shared information. For example, if I encrypt data using your public key, only you can decrypt it using your private key—ensuring confidentiality and non-repudiation. This process not only ensures that the data remains inaccessible to unauthorized parties but also guarantees its authenticity. Without encryption, sensitive information transmitted across networks becomes vulnerable to interception and exploitation. ...
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DevOps Enhancements: My Summer on Broadcom’s NetMaster Team

By Sage Yanoff posted 12 days ago
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DevOps Enhancements: My Summer on Broadcom’s NetMaster Team This summer at Broadcom, I had the opportunity to join the NetMaster team—a group responsible for a powerful network monitoring tool that tracks mainframe connections. Heading into the summer-long role, I wasn’t sure what to expect, as the NetMaster team works on a wide variety of projects. I was excited to dive in, learn new skills and technologies, and contribute wherever I could. Vault as a Service: Secure Credential Management in Jenkins My first project involved integrating all of NetMaster’s Jenkins pipelines with Vault, a secure tool for storing credentials. Instead ...
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Enhancing Greenplum Database Operability with 5 easy steps

By Sunil Seetharama posted 16 days ago
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Greenplum Database, built on PostgreSQL and designed for massively parallel data processing, powers analytics at scale. As with any large-scale distributed system, operability — the ability to observe, manage, and troubleshoot the system — is critical for long-term maintainability, ensuring uptime, and keeping the system healthy. To streamline operational workflows, Greenplum introduces a Task Scheduler — a lightweight, internal framework designed to run service-oriented tasks at scheduled intervals. Use cases range from scheduled execution of recurring tasks—such as running utilities like gprecoverseg to recover or rebalance segments, or performing ...
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