DevOps assumption limitation

[Mathew Goldstein]

Many of the DevOps presentations appear to assume that Red Hat, or zLinux, or some other flavor of Linux resides together with z/OS on the same machine. What if Linux is only available on a separate z/VM machine or on tier II or tier III platforms? Bridge for GIT, VS Code, and Zowe are several options that do not appear to require Linux or allow Linux to be on a different platform. But for some of the other tools it is not often not clearly stated up-front, or even as part of the presentation itself, whether or not Linux must reside on the z/OS machine.

[Michal Vasak]

Hi Mathew,

The presentations usually assume the Unix System Services component of z/OS is set up: 

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.3.0?topic=descriptions-zos-unix-system-services

The USS is distinct from Linux or Red Hat in that it is a component of z/OS, providing a Unix environment inside your z/OS one.

However, if this isn't an option for you and you want to use a separate Linux machine, it is doable:

The key piece of of the DevOps infrastructure that usually resides on USS are the Endevor Web Services. These talk to the Endevor backend via ENF/CCI, a communication service from our common services. For performance reasons it is better to have the Tomcat server hosting the web services on the same machine and ideally same LPAR as the Endevor backend, but if you have ENF/CCI set up on both machines, it is possible to separate these. This is not a standard setup, but if you want to try it, I can provide more details. 

[Vaughn Marshall]

All of our interfaces talk to the web services (except CMEW) and they can be installed off host if desired.  The web services are generally on the same machine as Michal notes.