As the mainframe community moves toward more agile, DevOps-driven practices, the question isn’t whether to adopt modern tools—it’s how to integrate them effectively.
Git, a distributed version control system, has emerged as the de facto standard for managing source code across the IT landscape. For adoption by mainframers, DevOps teams, and SysProg professionals accustomed to traditional source code management (SCM) tools—Endevor, ChangeMan, Code Pipeline (formerly ISPW), etc.— embracing Git is more than just changing tools. It’s about changing culture and aligning with the pace of modern software development.
What Is Git
Git is an open-source version control system designed to track file changes efficiently. Unlike depending on a central server, Git allows every developer to have a full copy of the repository locally, enabling them to branch, experiment, and merge code. Though not the sole offering in the version control space, Git offers capability and flexibility for most development scenarios.
A Platform for Modern Workflows
Historically, mainframes relied on SCM tools and library manager systems. These platform-specific tools deliver CI/CD activities. However, they require institutional knowledge and deep mainframe expertise that can be hard to pass on to new hires.
By contrast, Git servers—such as GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket—serve as comprehensive platforms for the entire software lifecycle, offering security controls, integrated pipelines, code reviews, and actions that help manage deployments and testing. These types of environments encourage simultaneous collaboration and merging of changes while aligning with the DevOps philosophy of continuous integration and delivery. Git helps teams develop and release mainframe applications faster and more reliably.
Overcoming Resistance
Alongside culture, another challenge to modernization is a lack of mainframe resources enabling DevOps and allowing agile delivery.
“To be truly Agile and implement DevOps effectively, developers need the freedom to do what they need to do, without environmental constraints,” says Stuart Ashby, Practice Leader at PopUp Mainframe. “Allocating the resources required for DevOps on the mainframe can be time-consuming and costly. Ideally, you need to permit access to the mainframe on-demand to the developer.”
That’s where a solution like the one Ashby works on comes in. It enables virtual mainframe environments to be spun up (and down) to meet developers’ needs. The “pop-up” environment offers a z/OS virtual instance, identical to a physical mainframe, for Dev and Test. Users can enable automation pipelines to provision and scale z/OS “Gold Copy” environments relatively cheaply.
But What About…
It’s okay to critique Git, though; a de facto standard doesn’t mean perfection. While one can extoll the virtues of Git for DevOps, Git can’t do everything on the mainframe because it wasn’t designed to.
While Git and most modern systems use UTF-8, in contrast, z/OS typically operates in EBCDIC. To address this, z/OS-specific working tree settings were introduced, enabling codepage translations so that source files can be stored in UTF-8 on Git servers, but read and compiled in EBCDIC on z/OS.
Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM Fellow, CTO for IBM Z and LinuxONE Ecosystem, acknowledges this as a minor but solvable problem: “There are some characters that cause problems with round-trip code conversion. You can simply replace them in the source code.” By “some characters,” she means three.
Another issue arises with large Git repositories and storing binary artifacts in Git—both practices that Git itself doesn’t recommend. Instead, teams should store only source code and small text files in Git, keeping binary artifacts in dedicated artifact repositories. The binary and repository size issues stem more from poor practice than from shortcomings of Git.
The Best Tool for the Job
Despite these challenges, Git can unify development across all enterprise platforms (distributed, cloud, and mainframe), ensuring consistent security, auditability, and compliance practices. Git can get there in a way SCM tools simply can’t.
Future-facing solutions like on-demand mainframe environments and open-source Git platforms move the mainframe toward agile and DevOps practices. As mainframe workloads integrate seamlessly into hybrid environments and pipelines, the platform’s survival will depend on its ability to modernize. As Bob Dylan famously penned, ‘The times they are a-changin’.
Penney Berryman, MPH (she/her), is the Content Editor for Planet Mainframe. She also writes health technology and online education marketing materials. Penney is based in Austin, Texas.
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