 My name is Jeff Rieser and I'm kind of filling in to do this presentation as part of the Open Mainframe project, part of the Linux Foundation and happy to do so. Sousa, I work for Sousa, we are members of the Open Mainframe project and we're very active in a lot of the communities that are being shown here at the Open Source Summit, so happy to be here. And before I get into the main topic here, I wanted to provide some relevance for talking about my own journey, my own career journey over the past, believe it or not, 40 years. I can't believe that either. But for me, I actually started way back in the last century with a college degree in astrophysics. And at the time, there were not many jobs available for someone with an astrophysics degree. I was offered a job by studying the atmosphere of Venus for two years. But after my two years was up, it would have been really interesting, but who knows where it would have gone after that. So I ended up going where the money was at the time, which was at IBM. And I started doing development. I did a lot of programming in Assembler, if you're familiar with what Assembler is, in VM, virtual machine, CP, which is control program at the time. So a long history there. And VM CP actually still exists today, maybe running some of my code, which is why it's so super reliable. I then moved into Java, Java 2 Enterprise Edition, Enterprise Java means for persistent memory, persistent storage. And it was very interesting work, worked a lot with Sun micro systems at the time, before they merged in with someone else. And I was responsible for Wedsphere, which was a web marketing product that worked across the S390X, or mainframe based architecture, as well as x86. So a lot of experience in programming that and architecting what Wedsphere was all about at that time. Then moved into data compression, pervasive encryption, got a little bit of experience in the security areas, which has grown to be top of mind in so many places around the world today, with the prevalence of cyber attacks. I started working with SUSE Linux back in 1999, when they first started partnering with IBM, and was involved in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM Z systems, which was S390X based. We did something specifically for the mainframe environment at the time. I officially retired from IBM in 2011. So I had been there for 30 years. So as soon as I reached 30 years, I ended up looking around and found a place to go called Progress Software, took the weekend off, then started their progress and worked on open database connectivity in the cloud at the time. So four years later, I moved to a company called Lexus Nexus. And for a short time before getting the opportunity to really work at SUSE. So I've been at SUSE now for six years. And I continue to work with the open mainframe project community because of my experience in the past with the mainframes. And now able to share my S390X experiences with the community. And what this session is really all about is with the next generation of programmers coming up. What opportunities exist for the new programmers, the next generation. There are still opportunities in the mainframe world. And it's not something that people hear about a lot. I mean, nobody goes into college these days and think of they think about, oh, I want to get a job with with mainframes when I get out of here. That's not top of mind for a lot of people. But still, the opportunities exist. And when you're writing cloud native applications today or other kinds of workloads today, you have to be aware of all the environments where your applications might run, where your workloads might run. It could be on an S390X very possibly. There are still a lot of mainframes out there today. A lot of them are in banks and financial services companies. So a lot of the transaction oriented processing takes place on mainframes around the world. Mainframes actually control a lot of the transactions that are going on around the world. If something were to happen with S390, the world would be hurting in a lot of ways. So it's when you're writing applications today, you always have to be cognizant of where possibly those applications might be running across x86 at the edge on mainframes across the board. So there are opportunities out there. Technology today, it adapts to what the businesses need. Infrastructure is turning into a very hybrid, multi-cloud, very fluid kind of environment. And you also have to be aware of that too when you're writing the applications. There's also the sense of microservices. Microservices could be running anywhere when you're building a cloud native application within containers. The containers could be say Python based and you're providing some microservices within that container as well. You might be using some immutable type OS and then you're fielding out those containers across many different platforms all managed by say Kubernetes. We've done some work in the mainframe environment to ensure that Kubernetes works in that environment too. And it might see a little bit later there's some instances where we have Kubernetes running. Rancher, if you're familiar with Rancher, is our cloud native application. It has a Kubernetes engine. It has some tools and facilities to help manage containers and containerization of applications. And we just recently had that working in the mainframe environment on IBM Z systems. If you're not familiar with what a mainframe looks like, it's actually there's a great framework of a Linux one box down in the IBM booth in the showcase. If you want to take a look at that. But open source, even in the mainframe world, it's becoming the connective thread. It's what ties everything that we're doing together. And it's becoming so important to any business that's out there. And mainframe has started 50 years ago. It's started with these design principles always around security. And this is secure software supply chain. It's secure common criteria certifications. It's pervasive encryption, database encryption, everything that's done within the framework of the mainframe. And supporting many different kinds of applications and environments and cloud environments that are running on top of the mainframe. So security, availability, scalability and performance, of course. So it's and those principles have existed for this long, it's become a super resilient, super secure platform, and supporting a lot of the program modern programming languages of today. So what's what's really made it interesting. So there's been a surge really of investment in the mainframes. And this points to a recent survey that was done that says organizations expect to increase the frequency of new mainframe application feature deployments. And a lot of this might be driven by some of the main customers of mainframes like financial institutions that are looking at this they're looking at fintech. And there's a community called Finos financial technology OS for for banking for finance. And there are some really interesting projects happening right now with things like Rancher, in order to use that in an open source environment at banks. So lots of interesting work going on right now for that security top of mind, especially in banks and fraud detection and everything that they're doing in these swirly times. Also, it's being adopted in the DevOps DevOps area as well. The mainframe development itself, as I said, early on in my career, I programmed an assembler and machine language, which is not machine learning by any means, but it's machine language, which was pretty intense. Today, we have Python and Java and Rust and well supported on the mainframe. And one of the carryovers from the golden days of the mainframe is COBOL. And COBOL development, it has a resurgent kind of view. It's being used more and more today. It can be done with tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse. And there's something that came out of the open mainframe project community called Zoe. And what Zoe does it provides a nice graphical user interface for ZOS, which was the main proprietary system that was used on IBM Z systems. So it provides some nice desktop tools to help put together some of these new programs. As far as mainframe jobs go, there are plentiful. There are quite a few out there. It's not something that's in your face kind of thing. But if you go out looking for mainframe jobs, you'll be able to find them. They can be very lucrative. They have some pretty decent salaries, starting salaries for this. And the reason for this is that, yeah, mainframe still exists. It's on an architecture that is so resilient and secure that it's lasted this long. And banks and other big companies still use them. But the skills level, there's a huge skills gap because the people that were in tune with this 40 years ago are on their way out the door. They're retiring and they need to refresh the skills, the skills gap here. And that's, excuse me, that's really one of the reasons why open mainframe project is in existence. How do we close that skills gap? And that's really where we come along with this new community. A community has been in place for almost five years now. So at the open mainframe project, we really believe that organizations want to leverage their technology as a competitive advantage on mainframes. And we continue with the design principles that were set forth 40 years ago, security, scalability, performance. And there's been a lot of technical advances along the way for the mainframe to ensure that open source works in this environment as well. There's a whole landscape of various projects that have been incubated and started with the open mainframe project. I made this chart unreadable. So, but there's a lot of projects here. And I have some links at the very end that point to this landscape where you can go in to look at more detail at any one of these projects that are involved in automation or security or analytics on the mainframe using various languages, various runtimes. And they're always looking for starting up new projects as well that are related to this. So the open mainframe project vision has always been to being such a part of modernizing enterprise IT, understanding that when you build workloads today most likely you're going to be needing to run on a wide variety of different platforms, including the mainframe. So we want to make it consumable for mainstream developers and users as well and all in the name of open source. So here's a list of some of the projects that are ongoing right now. We have some active, very active projects like, like I mentioned, Zoey. And I'll get to mentorship as well. We have some projects that are in the incubation phase where they're trying to drum up some interest and some support and some new members, things like Feilong on the second column, the last column on the right. Feilong is a ZVM connector to the cloud. It uses OpenStack and they meet regularly and talk about what they can do in the future and what kind of GitHub activities are involved there for any one of these incubation projects. Sandbox and there's some working groups as well for COBOL, for Linux distributions. So interesting, good collection of projects and this is just a subset of everything that I showed on that landscape chart. One of the problems that was recognized by the Open Mainframe project early on was the need to replenish this aging workforce that they had to deal with and they needed to reinforce it with more talent, more skilled professionals with so many people involved in programming at the time had, how about educating them on what to do in the mainframe environment too in the name of security and scalability and performance. So it was launched two years ago in 2020 and it basically offers a simple education platform. Anyone can go out and look up the materials, go through some of the webinars that are provided, understand more how to deal with this other platform that you most likely will see at some point, especially if you're doing some global business in the financial area. So there's a new Git Book resource as well that's available and I have links to all of these at the very end of this session as well if you want to take a look and it basically makes it easier to and more accessible for any of this for anyone who wants to learn more. Oh, here's some links. Don't have to wait till the end. Explore on Git Books. You can connect with other users and developers on Slack. There's a Slack channel that I'm on that a number of us, everyone in the community is on and available. Some good discussions that are available out there and you can sign up for it as well. And this whole deck is it will be available or is available in the repository so you can take a look at the links when at your convenience. The second problem that the Open Mainframe project took a look at was enabling innovation and modernizing COBOL. COBOL was used in the golden days like I said and it's being recognized again today being used more heavily today as well. And COBOL talent it's really important to what we're seeing happening in the programming world right now. The need for it was kind of amplified during the pandemic and so this community really wants to enable the next generation to have the COBOL skills to get involved in this so we innovated on launching a COBOL programming course as a start. For some it might be a refresher course for some it might be just brand new. So we can check that out too if you're interested in COBOL programming and there are ways to get involved with this as well. There's a forum, there's a discussion group, a working group for COBOL and COBOL because it's a more transaction oriented programming language. It's heavily involved in some of the security and fraud detection aspects that you might see out there and financial aspects too. The third major problem was getting good mainframe talent again because of the aging tenured mainframe talent that was retiring or moving on to different areas. There was a skills decline so what we did within the open mainframe project was start a mentorship program and this has worked out really well. Every summer we end up having five, six, 10 different interns at various companies and these are all of the member companies in open mainframe project participate in this. At SUSE we had a mentor a few years ago that was with us for the summertime and he was involved in Kubernetes on Z and it worked out so well he gained a lot of experience and at the end of the summer we ended up hiring him and he was able to come on board. Still worked on some mainframe stuff but he was able to branch out and work on some of the things he's still at SUSE right now and it's been really productive for him and really eye-opening for a lot of people that we could do this and bring in interns and the other member companies have done this as well. IBM has done this successfully and the other member companies too so it's worked out really well we're going to continue with the mentorship program and you can see the results on the right hand side. Some of the work includes ports of Alpine Linux, contributions to OpenStack, Hyperledger, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and a lot more so it's touching on the relevant topics that are out there today in a mainframe environment. Some pictures of some of the mentees and mentors that have been through the the summer program over the last five years we've had about 60 plus mentees from the sponsoring companies and well really about 100 different students that have been through the program and they end up presenting what they've done during the summer to a committee with an open mainframe project and then they go on. It's a good thing to put on the resume and it's also a good thing for the sponsoring companies to kind of bring in some new talent and this as an example we one of the companies brought in Salasu Ali on the right hand side there in the spring of 2020 and he ended up working on a project that involved Zoey which I had mentioned earlier that's the graphical user interface for ZOS and he was really successful at it he did a great job he learned a lot too and he ended up passing on his great experience to his brother on the left hand side Muhammad Ali and so they both were able to experience a wide variety of different opportunities after they completed their mentor a mentorship so it was it was very very useful and that's what the open mainframe project is really all about being able to enable innovation through community building things like mentorship things like education and and you can see well it's been seven years since since it launched these are all the the member companies today you see SUSE on the bottom here you see big names in the mainframe business like Rocket Software and BMC IBM but you also see some other big names in finance like ADP and some universities here too so it's a it's a very it's a close knit community and it's also a very productive community with the amount of mentorship that goes on project contributions that have been happening and the and the contributors I just want to mention too there is an open mainframe summit that's put on by this same community it's happening next week for all of you in Dublin if you happen to be in Philadelphia next week it's that's that's where it's at so we're looking forward to that and it's just another way to bring some education out to to the new main framers that are that might be out there and we've also had some podcast Steven Dickens host these podcasts now they're done on a regular basis Steven was at IBM for a long time with Linux one and now he works for an analyst called Futurum but he's he's very good at at interviewing some of the big people in in the mainframe business over time so he has a a wide collection of really good speakers that have been through this and this community like a lot of communities today there's growing diversity and inclusion is really important to what they're they're doing here and and what they're doing in the mainframe world with the open mainframe project you can read more about diversity in the mainframe business at one of the blogs that's pointed to here and along those same lines over 35 percent of the open mainframe project leadership is female and and you can see a good list of females here sorry the print is tiny but there are folks like I know Stacy Stacy Miller is here that she's up up there too and there's there's a lot of leadership in the community that's female based and doing some really good work there there are a lot of ways that we're trying to bring together the open source and the mainframe conversations we do this through forums the open mainframe project org site has a lot of information and the blog area as as well there are some things that we put out on youtube and the slack channel is probably the best way that people can start just to look at the group observe some of the conversations some of the interactions and kind of grease the skids and get you familiar with with what they're doing then there are ways to contribute to all of the projects that you see out on the the landscape for the open mainframe project there's technical working groups there's a technical steering committee uh so there's a lot of ways that people can contribute and just get involved in some of these projects and again some some ways that we can foster more participation or interest in mainframe when it comes to open source this is this is the future of the of what IBM is doing with Linux one what some of these big companies are are doing with the mainframe architecture you can learn a lot more about the open mainframe project the whole community at open mainframeproject.org like i said the the second link there where you can see the breadth of all of the open source projects on the mainframe that's an l at the beginning it looks kind of weird but that's an l.openmainframeproject.org and the l stands for landscape and you can take a look at all of the hosted projects that are out there and and take part in some of the events some of the webinars it could be really interesting and and for the next gen a good way to beef up the skills and that's it so yeah we're able to finish in 30 minutes so that's that's good so um if you have any questions at all or any any comments i'm open i'll be here for a few moment yeah um good question uh last stats i heard on that was that most of the top 100 financial institutions um i can't give you a quantifiable number but most of them still do and but they they've all branched out and they have all these other environments and and cloud environments they have to deal with in most cases at the banks that i worked with they have they have a mainframe internally that they use a very secure environment but when they're interacting with their customers their clients they use the cloud and the cloud is maybe on some other some other platform but but most of the transactions and all of the things that need to be secure and scalable are on the mainframe i think some of the stats that you might be looking for on the mainframe project yeah thanks thanks tacy yeah the mentorships um they can go to uh the the question i'll just repeat the question so where where can someone a younger programmer go to uh to find out more about the linux foundation member mentorships and for for this project if you go out to uh the open mainframe project.org site there's a lot of information about the mentorships there and and some pointers to to where you can get started with that okay yes well uh we saw more interest of it during the pandemic um for whatever reason uh now that uh we're entering kind of a new phase we might it might go back but um at least for right now we're seeing a lot of interest uh just uh because of the transactional nature of it it is it's a great way to get started with it yeah yeah it's available out there all right well thanks a lot for your time i appreciate it