We’ve Got the Secret Sauce with Zowe LTS V3 – The Open Mainframe EP27

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel from Techstrong, and you're watching another edition of the Open Mainframe. ai, techron dot itsm. com.

That there another Textron site. So thanks for joining in. Um, you know, as, as the name might imply, we talk about all things dealing with the open mainframe and mainframe and modernization of apps and how the mainframe is staying current in, in today's technologically advanced state age or state.

Um, when we talk about the Open Mainframe Project is, it's really an umbrella in and of itself of 20 some odd different projects. And our friend John Murdoch, who's is going to, he's the executive director of Open Mainframe Project's, gonna tell us about them in a moment. But before we get to that, sticking to it to the Open Mainframe Project, Zoe is probably the one of the best known projects within that umbrella.

And we're gonna find out, we'll hear more about Zoe. I, I assume a lot of you out here have heard of Zoe, but if not, not to worry, we're gonna bring you up to speed. Today's episode is a big one.

It's been a new release of the long term stable, uh, release of Zoe. If you're familiar with open source nomenclature and releases, you know, this is a major release and it's version three. We're going to hear everything that's cool and new inside of that, uh, as well as more about Zoe.

Let me introduce you, though, introduce you though to our fantastic panel. We're gonna be talking about Zoe lts, V three. First of all, she's a software developer for the DevOps.

Love it. Uh, IBM Wze love that too, as well as cloud IDE. She's also the Zoe Explorer squad lead, Billie Jean Simmons.

Hey, Billy Jean, how are you? Hey, I am doing well. Thanks for having me, Ellen.

Thanks. Right, coming on Billie Jean, beyond the titles that I mentioned, why don't you give people a little bit of your background? Well, I, um, been with IBM close to seven years now, and when I came in, um, they, they really didn't have a place for me.

Um, I got assigned to the Zoe Project, um, it was still in its beta state. This was back in, what, 2018 I think. And so I got to meet a lot of the, um, big folks there that started the project out between the different companies and met with a lot of the, um, people from all over, from UK and up north up there with, um, John Ick, and then also from Rocket Software.

But, so I've been on, you know, on the project there for a while now, working on the host components as well as CLI and Zoe Explore. But we found our niche on the, on the client side, and I've helped with the CLI and Zoe Explorer and been the squad lead for Zoe Explore getting close to four years now, I think. Fantastic.

Thank you for all you do for Zoe as well as being here today. Next I want to introduce you to Jacob Bahar. Jacob is Open Mainframe project ambassador, principal product owner at Broadcom.

And, and the Zoe TSC chair. Jacob, welcome. Beyond the titles again.

Let's hear more about you. Hey everyone, I'm glad to be here. My main role is with Zoe for the last four and a half years.

Before that, I was heavily involved in the security space, and I still believe that security is an important and driving force within Zoe. And that's where I'm still investing most of my effort, uh, when leading Zoe technical steering committee. Love it.

Thank you, Jacob. Next, and, and I will apologize in advance. You know, the infinite guards were not smiling on us today.

They're bringing Lenny asco. If I mispronounce Lenny, correct me. Yeah, you Nailed it.

They're not great. Yes, Lenny, you got it. Thank you.

Sorry, go ahead. No, no. Lenny's a software engineer with Rocket Software as well as Scrub Master, but Lenny, beyond that, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure, thanks. I was going to add that I now set up ethernet, so hopefully the camera quality should be good and, um, we shouldn't be losing me anymore, but, uh, Sound great. Okay, cool.

So the general summary is, uh, you know, my name is Lenny. Hello everyone. I've been a part of Zoey for, uh, let's see, over, over six years now.

I started as an intern, uh, straight Outta school, um, back when Zoe was quite young. It would've been about 1-year-old. Um, and I am a software engineer and scrum master for our Zoe team here at Rocket Software.

We're primarily responsible for the application framework. We, the, uh, group of components around the virtual desktop, its clients, its servers, and, uh, the apps and ZOS utilities on top of that. Love it, love it, love it, love it.

Alright. And then our last panel member, but certainly not our least, he has a lot of hats. He's an author, he's the executive director of the Open Mainframe Project, but he works on a lot of different Linux Foundation projects.

Uh, and he's from Ohio or down ver Or as Billy says, way up north, um, Way up north. Way up north. Uh, no, no, no.

And John, good to see you. Good to see you as well. It's been a while, um, and kind of excited to talk about this project and the, and the work going on here.

Absolutely. John, before we jump into Zoe, I made reference earlier to that the Open Mainframe project is very much sort of an umbrella Mm-Hmm. For 20 some odd different mainframe related, uh, projects.

Yeah. All projects. But yeah.

Yeah. Give us a little, a little flavor for that and then we're gonna jump into Zoe. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're sort of a home of, of, um, open source collaboration and other sort of, you know, still open collaboration work that is, is really designed specifically for the mainframe space.

I mean, we do some work, um, with some adjacent communities, um, open telemetry, for example. Um, we've done some, some work in there. Um, but by and large, a lot of our focus, um, is really just how do we grow the open source ecosystem in the mainframe.

Zoey has, has sort of been that, um, you know, uh, flagship project, um, for dopamine from project for a number of years, but if you've been paying attention to the news or if you're a tech exchange, um, well, as we record last week, but I'm sure once this goes live, maybe, you know, two weeks ago, um, we announced actually two new projects, um, you know, the source and the open, um, community, which are really gonna be, which again, just kind of continue that area of projects in that space, and I'm sure we'll get to talk about those in a future, um, you know, episode here. Um, but really this one here, we, we, we, we wanna focus on Zoe, which is really has pushed the Z os community towards open and open source. You've probably, if you've heard me talk about mainframe before, you'll always hear reset mention, open source comes from the mainframe community, you know, goes back to the 1950s and share.

But really where we're at with moderate open source, Zoe, is like the project, um, that is the one that everyone looks to, to say what is an example of open source in the mainframe community and, and more broadly across open source. I think I, I read some of the CNCF, um, velocity reports, and Zoe constantly sits at about the top 50 of velocity projects, um, that CNCF tracks, um, both LF and, and broader. So it's, it's a huge project.

Fantastic. Thank you. Jacob, if you don't mind, I'm gonna start with you.

There might be some people, you know, our audience is DevOps, people, cybersecurity people, cloud, cloud native. Today, everyone's on AI or in AI, somehow ITSM, but there might be people out here who say, Zoe never heard of it. Right?

And here we are saying what a big deal version three is. So for those people, we gotta catch up. So version three release makes sense to them.

How would you describe Zoe to them, Jacob? Well, the goal of Zoe is to make the ZOS platform more available for any developer regardless of whether they are coming from college or from other engineering environments or other platforms or other languages. And it provides the tools that make it more like any other platform, making it easy to interact with the Z os platform from your favorite IDs, if you are a developer, making it easy to automate and interact with it non interactively within your pipelines, regardless of whether you use GitHub actions, Jenkins, or some other tools to develop them.

And it provides you with a tooling that's necessary to manage the APIs and run your applications that are written for web in the virtual desktop. So basically it's a suite of products that allows you to access the ZOS in any way you want, in a way that's probably familiar to you as a non ZOS developer at this point. Billy, Jean, anything you wanna add to that in kind of how you think of Zoe?

No, he, he covered it great. I do like the, um, way that he mentioned you can, you have many opportunities to find some way that is familiar to you to access the ZOS, whether you're familiar with command line interface or VS code or if you're more used to, um, working on a browser. So all those capabilities are there and that is great that you can access it through so many different, um, environment setups.

Great. Lenny, anything else on Zoe you wanna add? Sure.

Um, well tho those were absolutely excellent summaries so far. I would add that it is absolutely a, uh, community, uh, that is growing and thriving also, uh, very extensible and very peer led. You know, we will have, for example, um, you know, customers or vendors that, you know, come up through, um, you know, starting with Zoe or starting with a proof of concept and they become more involved.

Maybe they're requesting features or they're looking forwards to something and, um, you know, they'll join calls and we have folks that are influencing in real time the roadmap of Zoey as it happens. And I think that level of, um, you know, influence that a customer or a vendor or a third party developer or whoever may have, um, you know, you, you only get that right in an open source community. And I would argue that's a bit rare for the mainframe industry.

And that is a, a unique point of value in my opinion. Absolutely. I, I gotta tell you, for me, I always think of Zoe as, okay, if the, if the mountain's not gonna come to Mohamed Muhammad's coming to the mountain, right?

Where you don't want to work cold ball, you don't want to be a mainframe programmer, that's cool because we are modernized the whole ZOS and the whole hardware platform behind it so that you could work on these mar in these modern environments with these modern tools that you've learned and use every day. And now guess what? It works on the mainframe too.

So we've come to you and, and this, this is huge, right? 'cause look, we, we, we, a lot of people throw around the term mainframe modernization. Modern mainframe modernization means different things than different people, right?

Some people think it's code for migrating off the mainframe. We're gonna modernize so much that we're not gonna use mainframe nonsense. No one's pulling their mainframes out, right?

But we do want to use things like Java on the white mainframe. We wanna be able to do DevOps on the mainframe. We wanna be able to use modern languages on the mainframe.

We want the mainframe's pretty secure to begin with, but our development practices, aret always so secure and, and you introduce those insecurities into the supply chain and there you go. You got trouble. So to me, Zoe represents true modernization of the mainframe.

I don't know, did I, John, did I steal your thunder on that? You agree? No, no.

You, you, you nailed it. I mean, you know, so, so often the mainframe has just been considered this, this platform that is just different than everything else. And therefore different.

Whether, whether the actual technical is good or bad, different is bad. Um, and, and Zoe knocks that down because it says it's not different anymore. It's the same, it's the same tools to work with.

And, and, and I think that's the, and, and I think you hit the nail on the head. That's the overarching message here. Um, Zoe, Zoe has opened up this world to the fact that we see more broad it, you know, just not only press coverage, but also customers looking at it, um, and other vendors looking at it from that angle as well.

So it's, It's, it's really just opened everyone's eyes, I think, more than anything. Absolutely. Before we jump into the particulars of this release, I think we've got it set the table a little bit.

So this release is Zoe, LTS version three LTS. And if I'm wrong, correct me 'cause I've been the real busy boy this today long term stable, right? Is LTS, Right.

So long term stable release. And, and this is something we get from like a lot of Linux. Red Hat does it, a lot of the Linux, this shows do it where, you know, you could sign up for the long-term stable release that doesn't get updated monthly or all the time, but it's, it's just that it's stable, it's rock solid.

And when we put a new version of that out, it's a pretty major thing. Incorporates a lot of what we'll see in, in shorter term releases. Not necessarily beta, but you know, if people want to be on that faster dev cycle and, and do that.

But for most organizations, constant change and te and using stuff that may have not been fully vetted yet is a little risk, especially when we're talking about the mission critical stuff mainframes do. So they tend to want to say, Hey, I'll take the long-term stability over short-term, you know, feature experimentation. 'cause eventually it'll come to me if it's good anyway.

Right? And, and that's the idea behind the LPS release cycle. Fair Jacob?

You, you agree? Uh, somewhat. All right.

Correct me. So for Zoe, we do release in two ways. There are active releases and maintenance releases.

On the major level, the fact that we have released V three means that we have released a new active major version, meaning that this active major version will get updates and features on a three month cycle. Okay. But you are talking about like stable, unchanging, rock, solid red hat.

We have it, but it's the V two right now. So if you, this is what you are looking for, now it's time to move to V two and have V two on your ZOS for the next two years, or, and that's fine. We will support you.

The LTS for us means that there will be four and a half years where we as a community will be supporting you. Where the first two years are more active, where we will be introducing more new functionality. Well, the second two and a half years are more stable, where we are introducing only patches and security fixes.

So it's similar, not exactly the same. Yeah, No, it's very different. I kind of like it, right?

So the first two years you're gonna see a lot of innovation, a lot of new features as they're coming down. But we are guarantee we meaning the open, you know, the, the Zoe project is guaranteeing that we will support that version two and a half years beyond that. So you have a four and a half year cycle on this version of the, of the software and that, that's fantastic.

Let me ask you, when did LT SV two come out? Was it four and a half years ago? Probably two, two years ago, right?

It Was ish two years. It was a bit over two years. I think it was two years and something like three months ago.

But yeah. And now it'll live in approximately two and a half year as the stable maintenance version. Fantastic.

Alright guys, we've done a great job of laying this all out. I think our audience now knows what Zoe is, what this release, why this release is a big deal. But let's get into the particulars.

Billie Jean, you're an engineer at heart here, right? What gets you excited about Zoe LTSB three? I think, uh, what gets me excited most, there's a lot of new functionality, um, that was brought in and, and it's, it seems to be a smoother user experience, especially in the VS code, the Zoe Explorer, um, component that came out V three just recently.

Um, a lot of new functionality in the CLI as well. Um, we're gonna let the others speak on some of the host components, but I know for Zoe Explorer itself, we, we revamped the entire trees and adopted, um, vs code APIs for the trees. So the users will get a lot more functionality and it'll be more seamless, like they see in their, um, vs code file Explorer.

It'll be resembled in the Zoe Explorer, uh, tree files. And then, um, then we bring in these new functionalities where you can compare your files right on the screen, um, using like a get diff view and you can compare, um, these files, you can compare your data sets, you can compare your UNIX files, you can compare data sets to Unix files. You can compare, um, files on different LPARs.

So you got a lot of good functionality there. We even brought in a new, um, functionality to issue Unix commands. We already had, um, the ability to issue MVS and TSO commands, but with V three we brought in, um, the ability to issue the Unix commands as well in the VS code space.

So, so those are some of the really cool highlights of, um, our client side V three releases there. Fantastic. And thank you.

Lenny, you're a, you're a, you are a stone cold software engineer, right? What gets you excited about Zoe be three? Sure.

Well, I'm, I'm a little, I'm a little all over the place actually. Uh, I do both engineering, but I also do scrum mastering and, uh, well as, as, as all of you folks as well on this panel. You know, we are all active members of the Open Mainframe project.

Um, so you know, a little bit on that end. But in terms of V three for the, uh, client side, I'm sorry, for the server side, for the app framework side, um, I would like to, uh, correctly define the atmosphere for the folks in the audience listening that know about Zoey previously, you know, whether that was one or two years ago. So the move from V one to V two, if you were a part of that was, um, there were a lot of changes and a lot of, uh, needed and positive architectural changes, but for the users it was a difficult move.

You know, things like the installation process changed. And so what I would high love to highlight for the V two to V three is that we were immensely, uh, focusing on improving the UX and adding more features. But not a lot has, uh, fundamentally changed because the architecture is quite sound.

And so in that sense, there is going to be less to learn, um, if you as a Zoe in know V two, you know, V three well. Um, and so that, that's, uh, you know, very useful. Um, on our side specifically, we had a huge, uh, technical challenge in up in the upgrade of Angular.

Um, but on the, on the user side, um, there's, uh, developers will need to upgrade their Angular apps, but, uh, I frame and react remains. Um, and so, uh, yeah, more, more features, more bug fixes and less new documentation to read, hopefully. Very cool.

Very cool. John. So you're not, well, maybe you are.

I I, I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say you're not as decal, technically pro as proficient in some of our panel members here, but you Probably not as much these, these, all of the stars here. Yeah. Yeah.

But anything they've left out that, you know, as the year at Open, uh, mainframe, you'd, you'd wanna call out. I mean, I, I think they've really sort of hit it well. I mean, this is, this is not the, you know, this is not the blow them away all sorts of crazy things.

You're not gonna know what to expect next sort of Zoe release. This is, this is the one that hits with this community that says, Hey, we want progress. We want some new things.

You know, we want, you know, better integrations into, you know, to new IDs and sort of improving. And so we explore side of things, but we want stability. We want code cleanup, um, we want performance.

Um, and, and those are the things that, you know, as I sit and, and see this community work, that they sort of know that there's that balance, you know, the, the stuff that is important to the end developer of their environment, those are the things that can be a little bit more, you know, progressive and moving along. And so that's why you see Zoe Explorer just getting so much push going into it. But then on the other side of how do we kind of keep making, um, the core stuff work really, really, really well, you know, that's where this team stepped back and said, Hey, how can we refactor, how can we, um, enhance, how can we improve the install experience even more?

Um, and doubling down there. So it's, it's, it's really sort of like a, the, the, the sort of the revolution evolution sort of thing. You know, continuing to really push on the developer front because that's the group that, that needs tooling to be successful.

But the core parts of, of making sure that's a rock stability that customers have just known in this industry that you depend upon. Uh, piggy back off of that, off the install experience, for anyone of the audience who isn't aware for V three, we added a server install wizard in Zoey for the server side components. That is another, uh, huge part while not being part of V three, it is within that momentum of improving UX and the user, uh, install simplicity.

Excellent. So look, from how you guys have explained this to me, we are now entering a two year cycle of continued innovation in Zoe, though, right? Um, that's pretty cool.

Beyond what you know is in this initial V three release, what kind of things might we expect in the next two years? Jacob, do you wanna maybe kick that off? I will, and I will start with like the large items.

I think that within the next two years, we will see the Python SDK graduating and becoming something that the customers can depend on, just like it happened with node js, uh, with this release. Mm-hmm, the cotton SDK will gonna move in the same area, which will enhance the capabilities that you can use to interact program in a programming way with the Z-O-S-M-F and in the ZOS mainframe, we will definitely see more integration between the client site and the, uh, and the service site. So the client side will be more leveraging tools like the personal access tokens, uh, client certificates for authentication, the fact that various services can, uh, integrate in the single sign-on.

And then I guess that we will also see more in the security space. We are already, uh, I would say among the, definitely among the better, but maybe even among the best projects in what we do to make sure that we understand well our security posture, that we understand in depth what our dependencies are and how they behave with respect to their support, which is something we will also continue working on and improve. And as part of this, I expect that there will be quite some amount of work in the security space, meaning like authentication, authorization, how the different services work together in this area.

How is it, uh, reflected in the VS code in the intelli in the virtual desktop or just in the plain rests interfaces? That's what I see in our next two years of a fu of a future. Billy Jean, without dissing him, anything he left out or that you'd like to see?

No, he's definitely on the right track. Um, even for our client side products, we are looking into more, um, support for different secure methods of authentication, like, uh, proxy support, direct connect certificate support, especially in the VS code space. It does already exist in the CLI.

Um, I know we're looking into integrating, uh, our different commands that I spoke of earlier about having the ability to issue. We want to, um, integrate more into VS codes APIs for integrated terminals. So it's, it feels more like a regular, um, SSH connection or TSO connection for our users, you know, just that familiarity and, um, just, you know, listening to our customers taking that feedback.

Um, we, we got some during our V three system demo, they want to be able to use their certificates that are stored in their private key stores. They don't wanna, you know, write out where it's located on their profile and have that saved in a different location. So we're, we're looking at that feedback, trying to figure out the best way to, um, tackle that for all the products, because this is, you know, a lot of this stuff is cross product support, so just building on those and, you know, Yako definitely kicked it off there, especially on the security stuff.

Fair. Let, if you were king of Zoe for the day, what would you like to see on the roadmap that hasn't already been, uh, spoken about by Jacob and Billie Jean? Sure.

Um, well, that, that's, that's a large question. Mm-Hmm. Uh, I, I guess my answer to that would be we have two or three things that are early in development or were successful prototypes, um, you know, slash um, hackathons that are, uh, sitting there as priority twos and threes.

And I don't know, because, uh, you know, I don't have the, uh, I'm not responsible for the ro for the entirety of the roadmap moving forward, but some of the things on that list I imagine are gonna be moving closer towards the future. So these are very exciting things. For example, like the, uh, app store in which a significant chunk of the front end is done, a little bit of the backend is done.

Um, this is, you know, for installing, uh, apps on the desktop or other ZO components as well, they can leverage the desktop to install. Um, we could be looking at things like a closer embedding and interaction with Z-O-S-M-F and, uh, the desktop in the future. Um, you know, uh, kind of, uh, working alongside with some of the, uh, assistance and other apps within Z-O-S-M-F, um, and, and, uh, those things, um, we're definitely going to see enhancements to that Zoe Server install wizard that I mentioned previously.

Um, there are, uh, lots of cool things on the way there. Um, and there's a whole world that of course, you know, I I, I am vaguely aware of, you know, but I can't talk about on this call, you know, for some of, um, the, uh, companies and vendors that have exciting new apps that they're developing on the desktop as well. Um, all of that is, is, uh, pretty, um, flavorful.

Very cool. Very cool. You know, one of the things a couple of you mentioned was the Zoe community and, and just the way, you know, coming out with a new version of Zoe takes a lot of hard work.

The care and feeling of the community is something that you, you can't just take for granted. You have to be purposeful about it. John, that's kind of right.

This is one of your areas of expertise. I mean, what are we doing to care and feed for Zoe's community as we reach this threshold here? You know, open source communities are, are always kind of interesting, right?

Um, there's, there's the aspect of, of one, of providing sort of that good, strong, sustainable home, um, for the work that's happening, but then there's the other half of like, Hey, how do we look forward to the future and, and help sort of build all of this up? Because I mean, this, this mainframe community is 60 plus years old now, um, and they're looking at how can, um, Zoe be another 60 years, you know, be part of this next 60 years where mainframe goes. Um, you know, so there's, there, there's definitely, definitely a lot of things.

I mean, I think one, we do spend a lot of time, we work with Zoe, um, on a lot of their governance structures. Um, I know one thing that Zoe is, is putting in place from their infrastructure side is, you know, ensuring that they're in line with like a lot of the open Ss f best practices badge. And I know they're doing a heavy amount of work on the gold badge.

And if you're not familiar with those on one ha on one aspect, they're very much centered around security practices. But the reality is, is to be a good security minded project means you're a very well run project. And those badges really align back, um, with those pieces.

Um, you know, and additionally, we're, we're working to make sure that, you know, Zoe can be very present events, um, that we're constantly getting the word out around who the people are, what the work is going, may spend tireless time on that. Uh, we have a strong ambassadors program where we've seen folks from the Zoe community that really just love to go out and tell the story of Zoe. Um, you know, we arm them and get them ready and, and get them the ways that they can help do that, um, you know, even more effectively.

Um, but I will say one thing I think about this community is it, it already has a lot of these concepts built in to its DNA. So there's not, it's really not a lot of external stuff we really need to interject. Um, it's more of, you just see more new natural people that just start to flow in and, and have various interests, um, and, and, and, you know, and start to connect.

So, um, and, and I think a mentorship program or mentorship program, which Zoe's taken advantage of quite a bit, has been quite a great tool to leverage all of that. So it's, you know, I, and I don't know, I mean, you know, you know, I kind of went from Yucca and, and Billy and, and Lenny. I mean, what do you see as, as community sustaining and growing things that, you know, you all are thinking about?

I don't know about other folks, but, uh, speaking as a mentor, I am absolutely looking forward to the, um, uh, open mainframe projects mentorship program, having an open Z box for mentees to use, that's going to be exciting. Um, you know, 'cause that there, there's a lot of development that can happen, you know, related to ZOS. Um, and we're doing a good job at, you know, kind of working with what we have.

That's, that's gonna be exciting and that's going to absolutely accelerate, um, the output of future, uh, mentorship projects. Because, you know, I mean, I'm, um, you know, there's, I see a lot of young people in, in the panel, uh, list here as, this is just speaking for myself. You know, I'll, I'll interview my mentees or my interns, I'll talk to these guys.

And man, they are, they're, they're smarter than us. They, they started coding in middle school, you know, I didn't start In middle school. So, Um, I'm excited for that.

That'll really help us once we get that secured. Anyone else? No, I Will say that it's a difficult thing.

I really believe what Lenny is saying, that we need to make sure that people that want to start and want, want to work with us as some infrastructure to test with. I did try the infrastructure that you couldn't get in the IBM Cloud. I failed.

I wasn't able to set it up. So I hope that there will be something easier to set up. And apart from that, we are actively outreaching to the people on the conferences.

We are actively managing and helping and hoping to direct people into the community from the Slack that's being driven by the Open Mainframe Project. And we are actively reaching out through the discord, uh, channels that, uh, bill Pereira started. No, still in Perva, sorry.

Always manage mismanaging people. But anyway, these are the sources where we are actively trying to engage with the new people. But it's hard, it's hard to make sure that they can actually join the community.

They usually don't have the time to engage with us in a synchronous manner. So what we are seeing more is that they engage in some issues, opening them, maybe voting it up, And we don't have the answer yet, how to change this. So if you are listening to this podcast and you wants to be part of the community and have no idea how, reach out to me.

There will be some conduct information somewhere around here, and we will figure out how to help you to join us. That, that's excellent. Thank you, Jacob.

So guys, we're on about 40 minutes, maybe more than 40 minutes already. You know what? I haven't heard ai and that's very unusual from where I sit.

'cause it's, I don't usually go six or seven minutes into a tech conversation without hearing ai. Is AI not part of the roadmap here or we just No, obviously we have, we, we obviously have AI on our roadmap. We don't have any idea just like the others, what it will do.

It's probably gonna be as useful as for most of the other use cases, but definitely there is going to be some ai, maybe it's not gonna be artificial intelligence, but advanced identification or something else. But no, no, let's be real. We don't have anything in plan right now.

Like in most of the places we are looking for. Uh, it's already integrated in the IDs. So what else?

Actually, I was gonna say, it's in, it's in your IDE, it's generating code, whether you acknowledge it or not, right? People are using it to generate code. Yeah.

Well, any, uh, Jean any thoughts on that? Yeah, and, and you, you're certainly seeing, um, you know, aspects of the community, uh, using that already. You know, you have, um, some basic AI in security scan bots and that's, uh, you know, very useful for analyzing the dependencies.

Um, right, like Yako mentioned, we, you know, throughout development we use AI and perhaps that is the most valuable, uh, asset of AI at the moment. You know, being able to, um, uh, develop quicker and at a higher quality, which will lead to, you know, more features, it will lead to, um, you know, more services registered on the mediation layer, more apps on the desktop, so that, that absolutely should not be understated. Um, and, uh, I mean, we, there, it's, it's a little early to talk about and, you know, maybe I'll rustle some feathers and so be it.

And that's okay. Um, there is a advanced search feature, uh, sometime in the future on the roadmap that will, um, you know, we're still architecting the AI element of that, but that could be something to look forward to in the future. Excellent.

I, one other thing I wanna bring up here, right? Look at a time when the majority of the internet traffic on the internet is API talking to API, there's been some significant work in B three, right? On this API uh, mediation layer.

Anybody wanna take a crack in explaining that? Yes, this is definitely the one for me because apart from being Zoe, TSC, I'm also a PML squeeze squad D. Okay.

But to be fair, the a p mediation there in V two and in V three at this stage are doing more or less the same. It does provide you with a single sign-on it does provide you with the possibility to view and try out the APIs. So some kind of a catalog where you can go through them, explore them and use them.

It does give you the understanding and information about all the services that are within your infrastructure about their health and state. But sadly, that's what you get with V three as well. We did have to rebuild some pieces of the infrastructure to make sure that we are moving to something that's well supported, well protected, and up to date with the current situation.

And it did took us a bit longer than we expected, and there will be some major implementation changes coming, but right now, if you just stick with V two A PML, you will get all those load balancing security authentication, ization, OIDC integration, multi-tenancy support functionality in V three. It's simplified in the way it's configured. So I, I would definitely recommend to use it in V three as it's easier to use.

Excellent. And I have some guys, go ahead, Billy Jean. I was gonna say, I have some stuff I can add on to that that, um, works along with the API mediation layer.

Our client side products, the CLI and Zoe explore did, um, introduce the support for having multiple API mediation layer instances with our client side products. That way if our users are connecting to multiple LPARs and each LPAR has its own API mediation layer instance, we do now support that with their, um, token authentication and everything. Where in V two, we did not, we only supported a single API mediation layer instance.

Very cool. Very good guys. We're, we're right here on our 45 minute, uh, mark me to wrap up.

V three is available now. Yes. Right.

Where do people go to download, get more information? org Is your place If you want. ZOW Right, Exactly.

Dot org. And If you go di want to go directly, then it's slash downloads. Excellent.

Hey John, I'm gonna give you the list, right? You're the, you're the ED after all. And so, um, back to your point on ai, I do what I mentioned, one of the new projects we announced, um, a tech exchange was a project called Source, which is sort of the first foray into the Open Mainframe project in the AI space.

So I suggest you, you all check, check that out. It gets in the area of, of helping developers with code intelligent and, and tooling like that. Um, but anyways, back onto your original question.

Um, you know, like I said, Zoe Zoe's a project that we, I I've, I've had the, the, the fortune and and luck of really spending a lot of time with over the years. You know, I was, I was a part of the early discussions in 2018 when we had some of the companies come together and thinking about the idea of what they wanted to do. Some of the early, early formation work, um, meetings in IBM Raleigh offices where we were trying to figure out names and all these sorts of things going on, um, to working with many leaders in this project, um, over the years, um, and now sort of where're at with the current crop of folks.

Um, you know, it's always a project that I, I, I go back and I look to, um, to see, you know, what creative things they ha they've solved. Um, not just from a, a technical aspect, 'cause they do amazing things there, but I think from an open source community aspect, um, they've, they've done some really cool things and they're things that, um, when I'm talking with other, and like I said, you, you know, Alan, I work with a ton of open source projects. When I talk to other communities, I reference things that the Zoe community has done and it has worked really well for.

Um, I also point out the things that it hasn't done as well for you. So those people don't make the same mistakes. But, um, it's, it's something that I feel like this community and this ecosystem can be really proud of, is not only is this a great technical milestone and a great technical piece of work that this whole ecosystem can use, but it's a great example overall at Open Source, how great collaboration happens and the outcomes from it.

Um, and, and I'm always just constantly amazed at, at really that front of it. So, so excited. We're at V three, um, and, uh, just more excited at what's to come.

So, Billie Jean, don't you gotta love it when those guys up north say you all, Oh yeah, Yeah. He doesn't know how to say it. You can tell he is up north.

Oh, all. What's your heart, Right? I Love it.

All right. Hey, let's end it here. Billy g Jacob, Lenny, thank you so much for joining us today.

And, and, and most of all, thank you all for the work you do on the Open Mainframe Project and the Zoe Project in particular, right? I know it's a bit of a labor of love for a lot of you, but it, it's appreciated as well. So thank you.

Thank you, John. Always great seeing you and kidding around with you, but I know how much you put into this as well. So thank you.

Um, I hope you've enjoyed this and I hope you learned something about Zoe and, and version three that's out there now. So check it out. But until next time, for the Open Mainframe Project and the Open Mainframe Video series, I'm Alan Shimmel for Techstrong.

Have a great day, everyone.