Join host Steven Dickens in this engaging episode of I Am a Mainframer featuring Brahadambal Srinivasan, Technical Architect at IBM, who leads teams focused on enabling an extensive ecosystem of open source software on Linux on Z.
Brahadambal shares how her career began in Linux, starting as a test engineer before moving through closed source and open source work, including seven years on IBM Power before transitioning to the mainframe side.
She discusses her global team split between India and Canada, and how working with a predominantly Gen Z group has been a rewarding two-way learning experience while helping them see that the mainframe is not legacy technology.
The episode also explores what Linux on Z really means, including how open source packages are ported to s390x, why endian differences matter, and how IBM works with the community to keep changes upstream rather than creating forks.
Brahadambal also explains the importance of accessibility through Open Mainframe Project repositories and GitHub Actions runners, plus the long-term commitment required to maintain around 160 packages and support customers and the community.
Looking ahead, she shares her belief that the mainframe will continue becoming more robust and remain well positioned for the next wave of AI-driven innovation.
Watch full episode here:
OR
Transcript:
This is the Mainframe Connect Podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. Sponsored by Phoenix Software International. Mainframe Connect includes the I Am a Mainframer series, the riveting Mainframe Voices series, and other content exploring relevant topics with mainframe professionals and offering insights into the industry and technology. Today’s episode is another in the I Am a Mainframer series, exploring the career journeys of mainframe professionals.
Steven:
“Hello, welcome. You’re joining us on the I Am a Mainframer Podcast. I’m your host, as always, Steven Dickens. I’m joined by Latha from IBM, and Latha, welcome to the show.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Thank you so much for having me on.”
Steven:
“So Latha, let’s get the listeners and the viewers already oriented to tell us a little bit about your role and what you do for IBM.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Yeah, I am a technical architect. I lead a couple of teams here in IBM, and our primary work is to ensure that we can enable an extensive ecosystem of open source software products on Linux on Z. My team’s primary work is to ensure we port and maintain currency for open source packages. Some of those packages are very well known, like Kubernetes or TensorFlow, and then MongoDB or CockroachDB are the names that come off the top of my mind, but it’s a big list of packages that we do maintain. And we send patches back to the community. We work with the community to ensure those packages are accepted by the community, so that we circle back to ensuring that our customers have the best experience for Linux on Z with the right important open source packages working for them.”
Steven:
“So this is called I Am a Mainframer podcast. Tell us a little bit about how you got into the platform. Maybe paint some of that story of the career arc. Maybe tell us when you first got onto the mainframe and started playing with the technology.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“It’s a very long career. I’ve been working for nearly 22 years now, and my first job started with Linux. So I’ve been in the platform, or the open source side of stuff, is really, really close to my heart. And that said, I started as a test engineer in a startup and then went on to do multiple other things, and I ended up doing closed source work for some years before I came to open source on IBM Power side. So I was a Linux board engineer for seven years in our Linux on Power, IBM Power, and then about four years back I happened to be able to get an opportunity to come over to the mainframe side. And I was again working on Linux, and I was enabling Kubernetes operators for a product. And then about two and a half years back, this opportunity that the current team that I lead was starting off in India, because I have a parallel team in Canada. And so it’s a global team. It’s a global collaboration that happens across multiple geographies. And so I was brought in to help lead this team. And my biggest pleasure has been that my entire team is Gen Zs. And you know, it was very good.”
Steven:
“Keeping you on your toes and keeping you fresh.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“No, they’re brilliant and they’re a really smart set of kids, and I have really good fun working with them. And I think the best thing that I can say is that we both are learning from each other. But it was the thing that was trying to get them to understand that the mainframe is not legacy. You know, even though the technology is older than they have been. It’s older than me.”
Steven:
“Just celebrated its birthday this week—I’m calling on Friday and September 10th—and it was April 7th that the platform turned 62.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Yes, it is. And it has kept itself current, right? Just the way we maintain currency for the open source packages that we port, the platform has also kept itself current with the times. There is a lot of research that goes behind that platform.”
Steven:
“Let’s maybe double click there, Latha.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Sure.”
Steven:
“You’ve said something a couple of times, which is very dear to my heart from my time at IBM. You said ‘Linux on Z’—I say ‘Z.’ Yes, I’m British. You’re among friends here, let’s call it Z. So you don’t call it ‘said Linux.’ And I know why. Maybe let’s find out a little bit on what Linux on Z means. What Linux, the Linux kernel and the Linux packages, as you mentioned—Kubernetes and operators. Yeah, let’s just maybe go deep and technical for a minute. What does it mean to port an open source package onto the s390x chip architecture? How much is different? Is the kernel different? There’s a whole bunch of kind of perception out there that this is weird Linux and it’s different. I even saw from my background, I know the difference and that. But I’d love to get you to kind of explain it. If somebody says, ‘Hey, can you port this?’ what does that involve?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Oh, yeah. Okay. So let me answer your first question. What is the challenge? It’s Linux is Linux. I did not really find it different when I’m actually on the s390x VM. I don’t find the interface different. The commands are not different. It’s Linux just the way it is on any other platform. I think people have this misconception that it is different. It’s, you know, it’s going to be too much and we need to learn a lot more to work on Z. It’s not so because if you have basic Linux skills on any other platform, you should be able to work on Linux on Z as well. The reason I don’t say Z Linux is because I think it is more on the kernel side where we keep talking about Z Linux. But when I’m talking about Linux on Z, I’m talking about porting applications that are, you know—and these are big products on their own—things like PostgreSQL or CockroachDB. Those are really big. And there’s a challenge with the database getting to work on the platform because there are endian differences. Because primarily almost all open source projects have been designed and tested on little-endian platforms, because that is more available for them. And Z is a big-endian architecture, and hence that is where we have to ensure that the addresses get mapped correctly, the data integrity is maintained, and so data itself also has to be made into big-endian. So the testing and then the code has to also take care that when we are giving out a patch, we are testing it to see that it is working really fine—exactly the way it works on x86 or ARM or anything else that we comparatively get it to work on. We test it on those platforms as well. We also try to see that it is working exactly the same, so the user experience at the end is going to be exactly the same. The challenge is in ensuring those patches don’t break what is already working for the rest of the community.”
Steven:
“While you’re making sure, is your team working with the Open Mainframe Project to ensure that that is promoted back up? You know, for the code does not become an s390x fork, what you’re doing is working with the community to put it back upstream to make sure that when the community launches the next version, all of the joint changes you’ve made are back upstream. Is that correct?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Yes, that’s correct. That is where we do definitely work along with the community. We send our patches back to the community. Of course, there are communities who have those reservations saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want to take in code,’ in which case we maintain the patch on our site for our customers. Those are very rare cases.”
Steven:
“Is that where the Open Mainframe Project helps? Is that because it’s an open source project talking to an open source project?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Yes, we currently are enabling more of our packages to be hosted on the OMP itself. So we’re working to ensure customers or anybody can actually download an s390x binary directly from the Open Mainframe Project as well.”
Steven:
“So that is sitting in IBM repos? They sit in open source repos under the Open Mainframe Project, basically?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Yes, so we are working with the Open Mainframe Project to give our scripts to them, and they put it into their CI pipelines to ensure that they get built. The other accessibility challenge for the community has been that they don’t have access to the hardware; they have not for a long time. But we have enabled that over the past few months—we have these GitHub Actions runners that are up and running, and a lot of communities have taken access to those runners. They are plugged into their CI so that when they’re testing and building for other platforms, they can build for s390x as well. So that has also been an amazing addition that has gone on now.”
Steven:
“So if you were to estimate, how many do you think open source packages have been ported? I remember this effort starting when we launched the Open Mainframe Project back in 2015. There was obviously a whole bunch of open source ported to the platform before 2015, but this effort really kind of started back then. If you were to estimate how many packages now do you think are ported to s390x?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“A lot of them actually. Especially on the operating system layer, I think everything that you need is already there. And on the application side is where we take a decision. We see if it is relevant to our customers; we don’t take every package out there and start porting it. We take care that it is of business value to our customers because when we are porting, after we port there is a cost to company forever more because as long as the upstream project exists, and they’re going to give us new versions, we are going to have to go back and have to test it and ensure that it is working on the platform every time. So it’s a lot of effort, back-end effort, that goes in to support these packages for the community and for our customers. And so we take a business decision to decide which packages to port. Then on the number of packages, I can’t say because a lot of teams inside of IBM are porting for their specific use cases or their specific projects. But we maintain about 160 packages on a currency list; about 160 as of now, but that is going to grow soon because we are bringing in new automation and tooling so that that gets faster.”
Steven:
“So if somebody in the community is listening to this podcast and they want to get access to something, where do they go to be able to get access to that code on the Open Mainframe Project site?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Oh, I did not keep my GitHub repository ready. “
Steven:
“They can just go to the Open Mainframe Project, get the repo, search for it there and find the path.”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Yes, there is another way because we have an IBM site also where we are hosting a link to the GitHub repository where they can get all the scripts, build scripts and the build instructions. And you can just pick up that script and run it on your Z VM and you should be able to build your own binaries for yourself.”
Steven:
“Is the plan to move away from having the IBM repo to have it under the Open Mainframe Project?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“No, that is not the plan because we will continue to maintain our site because our customers are used to coming here so I don’t want to take that away, but the Open Mainframe Project will also be available soon.”
Steven:
“So if you go back to something you said, I ask two questions of all of the guests on the show, so if you have listened to these you’ll know what’s coming. But you mentioned you work with a predominantly Gen Z team. So you’ve maybe got an interesting lens on this. You get the opportunity to go back and speak to 22-year-old you. There’s a time machine I’ve invented one for this podcast. You get the opportunity to go back. What advice would you give to yourself coming out of college?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“Exactly what I tell my Gen Z. When I joined the industry, I was in this hurry because I was seeing all these great, amazing, brilliant engineers in front of me and I was like, I have to be like that. But I never at that age put in perspective the number of years of experience they’re already put in. I was in this hurry to learn this and pick this up and that and everything, and also I was in this hurry thinking that I have to grow my career really, really fast. But I think it takes patience to build a career. And so my advice to my younger self is something I wish somebody had told me: it’s not a 100 meters sprint, it’s a marathon. Be patient. There are going to be challenges both personal and professional; be okay with that. There are definitely going to be times when you have to take a step back either way, and life is going to happen as you go. So learn to prioritize and take care of yourself. That’s one thing that I definitely want to say to my younger self.”
Steven:
“Fantastic, that’s great advice — marathon, not a sprint. So the other question I was asking, I got some fascinating answers and I think yours is going to be interesting because of the specific lens you have on the platform. Five years from now, where do you see the mainframe if you get to look at a crystal ball?”
Brahadambal Srinivasan:
“The platform is just definitely going to be much more robust, and it’s reliable already, but it’s even more in time with the AI momentum that is gathering. The platform is already on track with that, but it is definitely going to be really in that space. It’s going to be able to support what’s coming ahead of us, that’s for sure. I cannot emphasize enough how much goes behind that platform, and it is definitely going to be ready for that next momentum that the industry is going towards. That’s my crystal ball thing.”
Steven:
“Fantastic. Well thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been really great to talk. If you can listen to us here on another I Am a Mainframer podcast, please click like, subscribe, share with a friend, do all those things. We’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.”
