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.

 

Gary jumped straight into the session with:

“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:

1. We have developed a conveyor belt method to migrate data and config at speed from the physical mainframe to the PopUp, taking care of the SMS challenge.
2. PopUp provides system and helper utilities. For example, to help automate archiving, and CPU utilisation monitoring to assist in capacity management.
3. We have extended the Delphix Continuous Compliance engine to enable masking of ANY mainframe data source in 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.”

We have different flavours of PopUp. In this demo we show the PopUp & BMC, which comes with all the BMC DevOps tooling out of the box.

 

Getting Going with PopUp

We know implementing virtual mainframe environments might seem daunting, but don’t panic!

Our Delivery Manual is available to walk you through step-by-step how to get the most out of your PopUp.

We provide full product support with PopUp, and also manage anything to do with IBM zD&T.

 

 

 

Democratising Access to Mainframe

PopUp provides green screen for those who are comfortable with that, but it also enables users with modern IDEs and other tooling.

PopUp users can be productive quickly using their tools of choice, without any approval from the mainframe infrastructure teams or dependence on setup on the physical 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:

1. Spinning up a PopUp Mainframe in the cloud through the Azure MarketPlace. The PopUp can be ready to go in 6-8 minutes
2. 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)
3. Masking the sensitive data through Delphix Continuous Compliance
4. Creating the baseline ‘Gold copy’ PopUp containing the masked data and full application
5. Enabling easy creation of on-demand virtualized PopUp instances with fast, efficient checkpointing
6. Provisioning compliant dev environment through the Delphix self-service portal
7. Developer commits code change into Git, pipeline is kicked off to generate, test and deploy the change onto a PopUp, then do UI testing
8. Failure of automated UI testing
9. Rewinding the entire PopUp environment back to the previous version (not just the data, the entire app) through the self-service Delphix portal
10. 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.

 

Catch us at the upcoming GSE conference in November at Whittlebury Hall.

 
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