
Written by Jakub Balhar, Chair of the Zowe Technical Steering Committee and Staff Software Engineer at Broadcom with contributions from Broadcom’s Rose Sakach, Mike Dubois and Elliot Jalley as well as IBM’s Joe Winchester, all long-time members of the Zowe TSC or ZAC
The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe is a mature open source project with a stable community of contributors and a growing number of users. The project keeps up-to-date with relevant legal, technological, and platform updates.
Community members, conference attendees, and customers all indicate adoption and more importantly the use of Zowe is growing as organizations have doubled-down to execute on modernization initiatives. This is evident from the 85% of respondents to the mainframe user survey published in the 2024 Arcati Mainframe Yearbook indicating that their organizations will be adopting Zowe by the end of 2024 or have already adopted it into their modern enterprise solutions.
There are various Zowe data points that support this statement, including:
- More than 100k downloads of Zowe CLI during 2024
- Zowe Explorer for VS Code surpassed 1M downloads and serves more than 150k active users
- One of the newest Zowe core components – Zowe Explorer for IntelliJ is already approaching 10k downloads.
- Nearly 50k unique users visiting Zowe Docs with ten visits per user on average
- Over 12k visitors at zowe.org
- Over 4k server-side (i.e. Zowe API Mediation Layer & Zowe Desktop) downloads of Zowe V2 and nearly 1k for the newly released Zowe V3
- Increased demand and delivery of Zowe topics at world-wide conferences
Key use cases focused on general automation, security auditing and monitoring, IBM Db2 administration, shift-left development and operations also support the statement. Zowe consumers are gradually moving Zowe towards critical applications and application processes to simplify the automation, observation and management of those workloads.
With customers moving to production, the availability of enterprise-class support grows in importance. Zowe enjoys this support from comprehensive support providers such as Broadcom, IBM, Rocket, IBA Group and potentially more applicants. Learn more about the program and support vendors on the Zowe Conformant Support Program page. Broadcom announced earlier this year that their Enterprise Support for Zowe offering is being made available to all Broadcom mainframe customers at no additional cost.
The most important technical achievement for 2024 was the 3rd major Zowe release, Long Term Supoort V3. The V3 release brought Zowe’s first End of Support statement for V1 LTS. We highly recommend upgrading to a supported release if you are still on Zowe V1 LTS. In addition to the V3 release, Zowe published five minor releases in the V2 release stream and the final two in the V1 stream.
Based on the usage data, the community moved, frequently viewed zowe.org content over to Zowe docs. This allowed the Zowe community to simplify zowe.org and target content towards first-time visitors.
The majority of the 2024 documentation improvements focused on configuration consistency across different server-side components. Driven by more and more customers depending on hardware accelerated ICSF keyrings, another central area of improvement was the documentation of the AT-TLS setup.
In 2024, Zowe content was presented at 12 talks in SHARE Kansas City, 12 at Guide Share Europe UK, as well as many other zOS focused conferences worldwide. These sessions included customers sharing their success stories adopting Zowe as part of their mainframe modernization strategies, university educators talking about how Zowe has helped their students enjoy mainframe learning, as well as updates from the community and vendors on features and extensions in the Zowe ecosystem.
Contributions
The year 2024, on the other hand, saw a slight decrease in the activity of the contributors. Only 330 unique individuals contributed to the Zowe project based on the data provided by the LFX Insights platform, compared to 367 in the year 2020.
This decrease also resulted in a reduced number of articles published on the Zowe Medium blog. The 15 articles published are of high quality and definitely recommended reading for anyone interested in Zowe, its usages and policies. In 2024, the Zowe blogs were subcategorized to allow those related to CLI, Zowe Explorer, APIML and Zowe Desktop to have their own feature page. This is done for new as well as all historic articles, allowing for easier reading of blogs related to each of the four major components.
While these decreases might simply indicate a normal stabilization associated with a mature project, the Zowe community is always seeking new contributors and Thought Leaders to enhance the project and create more awareness of its value. If you think you might have something to offer to the Zowe community, you probably do!
Long Term Support (LTS) V3 Release
Zowe announced the launch of Zowe’s LTS V3 Release on October 3, 2024. We welcomed two new components in Zowe Core:
- Explorer for IntelliJ
- Node.js SDK
Two new components reached the GA level of maturity at the same time:
- Java Client SDK
- Kotlin Client SDK
A critical part of Zowe V3 was investment into Zowe’s durability. The Zowe community did it by refreshing the technological underpinnings of core components like the Desktop (Angular update) and the API Mediation Layer (replacing Netflix Zuul base gateway with Spring Cloud Gateway).
To simplify the installation and configuration of the server-side Zowe components, the Zowe Server Installation Wizard was introduced. It’s in the Technical Preview stage, and the Zowe Community is looking for feedback. It is a client-side technology designed to be easy to download and use. Please give it a try and share what you think on #zowe-install channel on Open Mainframe Project Slack!
With z/OS being the cornerstone of the modern enterprise that hosts the most critical enterprise workloads, stability and security are paramount. Zowe adheres to all of the cybersecurity and legal guidelines associated with development of the software. In line with the trends, the Zowe project introduced even stricter requirements for the dependencies of the Zowe package. To learn more about what exactly Zowe does from the security point of view, read Should I Be Concerned about Security with Zowe.
Plans for 2025
In the coming year, we plan to turn our attention to:
- Growing the community
- Enticing more vendors to participate either with contributions or extensions
- Limiting the frequency of continuous delivery releases to accommodate consumers interested in staying current
- Document details about System testing
- Improve upgrade and downgrade experience
Based on the feedback from the user community, we made two significant changes to the release delivery. First, we changed the new (active) release frequency to quarterly to make it easier for consumers to justify staying current with new functionality. Second, the Zowe community cut back on the frequency of maintenance fixes for the V2 (maintenance) release stream – limiting them to one per year. This will result in four releases in the V3 release stream and two in the V2 release stream over the course of their active and maintenance lifecycle, respectively.
With the addition of the Explorer for IntelliJ, the Zowe community plans to open the Conformance program for extensions, adding functionality to the Explorer for IntelliJ. Similarly, as the family of client SDKs grows, we intend to introduce a conformance program for the SDKs to ensure users have a similar experience regardless of which language they want to use.
If you have any suggestions for where Zowe should go in 2025, please open an issue to the TSC in the community repository or join the weekly TSC call held every Thursday at 9 AM EST on Zoom.
The Zowe team intends to enhance the documentation with the details on system testing and open a place for conformant support providers to provide details of additional testing they provide. The easy-to-consult table will assure users that their specific system configuration is tested.
One of the topics under-documented is the upgrade and potential downgrade of the Zowe server side. As the update is a regular topic for everyone using the Zowe server, we will invest in the documentation and better testing of the experience.
Summary
The development mentioned above cemented Zowe’s role as the primary Open Source framework for modernization that enables interoperability which includes facilitating automation, observability, and easier administration of the z/OS platform. The number of use cases where Zowe is a critical component is growing, and expect Zowe to become more and more integral to the key processes within the users, depending on its functionality.
If you enjoyed this blog, check out more Zowe blogs here. Or, ask a question and join the conversation on the Open Mainframe Project Slack Channel #Zowe-dev, #Zowe-user or #Zowe-onboarding. If this is your first time using the Open Mainframe Project Slack Channel register here.
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