 Hi, this is your host of Limb Hartia and welcome to a brand new episode of our series, TFI Topic of the Month, a.k.a. T3M. And this month's topic is platform engineering, is DevOps there. And today we have with us, Alan Clark, governing board member of the Open Mainframe Project and also member of CTO Office and Director of Industry Initiatives at SUSEA. Alan, it's great to have you on the show after a long time. Thank you, yeah, it's been a long time. It's great to talk with you today. How would you define platform engineering as a term in the context of open mainframe or mainframe? Okay, so mainframe, when you say the word mainframe, comes with a lot of preconceived ideas, right? It makes it kind of an interesting conundrum for today's developers. So they have these notions of old dinosaur, but yet at the same time, they recognize that it's a platform that's very robust, it's very secure, and it's very sustainable. So the reality is, and if you look at the market, the mainframe is growing. The modern mainframe is actually a key player in today's architectures. What kind of evolution, I mean technology, a lot of technologies in the open mainframe space, which is kind of not only modernizing a lot of mainframe technology, but also attracting a lot of modern developers towards that, which also means the culture, the community is also evolving. So if I ask you what kind of evolution you're seeing when it comes to labels like DevOps in the mainframe space? We're seeing an evolution with DevOps, right? So the key with DevOps has been the ability to bring about communication and collaboration, right? Those are the key things about DevOps. So when we talk about DevOps, I'm seeing DevOps evolve, but the key things like collaboration and communication are never going to go away. Those are key. The whole goal of DevOps has been to deliver software more quickly and more reliably, right? That's real life, and that's not going to go away. So how software gets developed, how it gets processed and deployed is going to continue to grow in importance in the future. So the key word here is evolution. I want to just go a little bit to understand the practices, disciplines, when we talk about DevOps, platform engineering, SREs, how does the lifecycle of an application look like in the open mainframe or mainframe world? So people can actually find some connections, some relations, they're, hey, this is how application developed and deployed and run there. It's very much the same. In fact, a lot of developers today don't even realize they are working on a mainframe because we have the modern architectures that they're used to, right? Cloud Native and microservices architectures are there on the mainframe. So this enables the mainframe to actually integrate with the other platforms. And so together I can build a comprehensive and tuned infrastructure where I can put the workloads that best fit my need. One more thing that we hear a lot about and it makes actually even more sense in the mainframe space is developer experience. The fact is that no matter what you're doing or modern businesses, you're trying to solve a problem for larger folks and that's why I created a business. So writing that big business application is critical of course running it, securing it, all the life cycle is also important but creating that is important. So can you also talk about, I mean, mainframe I think kind of both solve that experience, develop experience, the importance of developer experience and how is that experience is still there even when folks talk about DevOps where you're also a developer and also your operations team. Right, so you've got both, right? So let's talk about in general a little bit what the mainframe has to offer. Why would I want to include it as part of one of my targets for my architecture, right? One of the first one is its ability to scale up. So DevOps has always been about rapid deployment as my scale goes up, I'm deploying more and more broadly that becomes complex. So the ability to scale up on a mainframe is one of the things that is very well known for. Secondly, on the operations side, think about I've got all these workloads I want to consolidate, particularly if my company is looking at things like sustainability, then workload consolidation becomes very critical to my endeavor, right? So saving electricity, saving power, cooling space, saving time and energy of my developers, right? This is a win for putting part of your workloads on the mainframe. Then we talk about another case here to think about is the whole hybrid cloud story, right? Flexibility to put my workloads where they make sense. So that ability, mobility, that's the word I was trying to think of. So mobility and flexibility, the ability to move things on-prem and off-prem, that becomes very much a reality. Then I think one big key here for the developers to think about, right? So I talked about automation and flexibility, but key for developers as well, and part of that architecture is making sure things are still safe and compliant and secure, right? So one of the big topics we're seeing today is around confidential computing. The mainframe happens to be a key platform for confidential computing, all the way from ensuring that I've got a secure execution environments, all the way from my Linux operating system right up to the mechanisms that are ensuring that that Linux operating system hasn't been tampered with, right? So I've got, and that is coming from a trusted source. So I'm secure at that level. I can ensure confidentiality, integrity of the data. I can ensure that the data in use is protected, right? And beyond that, it's a safe environment, it's a quantum safe environment. So these are key. Talk a bit about the impact of that form like Git on the open mainframe community. So Git is there just like any other platform, right? So the purpose of Git is to automate and streamline your software development and your delivery processes, right? So Git in particular is used as a delivery approach where you leverage it as a source of truth. So it's a declarative infrastructure and applications use this as their single source of truth. It doesn't matter whether you're on the mainframe or on any other platform, same source, same source of truth. Are there any discussion going on within the open mainframe community in terms of these disciplines related to developers or if there are any specific initiatives which are there once again to attract these developers, DevOps platform engineers, sorry. Yeah, so the paradigms are the same, right? The tools are the same. That's the beauty of it is by bringing over these modern tools, Kubernetes and zero trust security architectures and so forth, right? The tools are the same and the developers don't have to differentiate them differently whether they're on the mainframe or on an x86 or on a risk platform or whatever. It's the same and they should treat the tools and leverage the tools as the same. Alan, thank you so much for taking time out and talk about this topic. And as well, I would love to have you back on the show but let's not keep that big gap between our meetings. Thank you. Yeah, hope to see you soon.