Open Mainframe Project Summer Mentorship Series: Midterm Updates – At this midpoint, our selected mentees are reporting in. Below, you’ll learn what they’ve built, the challenges they’ve overcome, and their goals for the rest of the summer. We’re proud of every contribution and eager to see what comes next. Hear from Ojus Chugh, Jaypee Institute Of Information Technology, Noida below.
In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, enterprises face the challenge of modernizing their core transactional systems—often powered by mainframes—that remain critical for mission‑critical workloads. My project under the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project mentorship seeks to bridge this gap by developing a Go SDK for Zowe, enabling seamless integration of cloud‑native Go applications with traditional mainframe services.
The Need for Mainframe Modernization
Mainframes have long been the backbone of industries such as banking, insurance, and government, processing millions of transactions daily with unmatched reliability and security. Yet, many of the interfaces and development workflows around z/OS date back decades, making it difficult for modern developers to leverage these systems efficiently. Modern IT teams expect RESTful APIs, command‑line tools, and IDE integrations—paradigms that have driven the cloud and container revolutions but were historically absent from the mainframe ecosystem.
Without modernization, organizations risk a talent gap: experienced mainframe experts are nearing retirement, while newer developers are fluent in languages like Go, Python, and JavaScript. Modernizing mainframe interfaces lowers the barrier to entry, promotes agility, and extends the lifespan of valuable legacy assets.
Introducing Zowe: A Gateway to Modern Mainframe Development
Zowe is an open source framework under the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project that delivers cloud‑style interfaces for z/OS. It offers:
- API Mediation Layer: A gateway providing a catalog of REST APIs and dynamic discovery for core z/OS services.
- Zowe CLI: A command‑line interface for interacting with datasets, jobs, and Unix System Services from scripts, shells, and IDEs.
- Zowe Explorer: A Visual Studio Code extension that integrates mainframe dataset and job management directly into developers’ favorite editor.
By unifying these components, Zowe empowers both mainframe specialists and cloud‑native developers to collaborate, automate, and extend z/OS capabilities with familiar tools and workflows.
Why Golang? The Language of Cloud‑Native Systems
Go (Golang) is a statically typed, compiled language designed at Google for high‑performance networked applications and large codebases. Key attributes that make Go ideal for cloud‑native development include:
- Concurrency Primitives: Goroutines and channels simplify writing highly concurrent services.
- Fast Compilation: Rapid build times accelerate development cycles.
- Single‑Binary Deployments: Statically linked binaries reduce runtime dependencies.
- Rich Standard Library: Out‑of‑the‑box support for HTTP, JSON, and other common protocols.
Unsurprisingly, Kubernetes itself and its official client libraries are written in Go, reflecting the language’s central role in modern infrastructure tooling.
The Go SDK for Zowe: Bridging Two Worlds
While Zowe currently provides client SDKs in Node.js, Java, Kotlin, Python, and Swift, a native Go SDK is missing. My project aims to fill this gap, enabling:
- Direct Integration with Kubernetes‑Native Apps
Developers building Go services—such as custom controllers, operators, and microservices on platforms like OpenShift—can now call z/OS APIs directly. This fosters end‑to‑end automation, where a Kubernetes operator written in Go can trigger mainframe batch jobs or retrieve dataset content with minimal impedance mismatch. - Improved Developer Experience
Go developers will benefit from strongly typed clients, idiomatic Go interfaces, and seamless error handling consistent with Go conventions, rather than manually crafting HTTP requests against Zowe’s API gateway. - Cloud‑Native Scalability
The Go SDK will leverage Go’s concurrency model to handle high‑throughput scenarios, such as streaming SMF data via the API Mediation Layer or parallelizing dataset transfers, while integrating with Kubernetes constructs like informers and workqueues.
Impact and Future Directions
By delivering a Go SDK for Zowe, this project will:
- Lower the barrier for Go developers to interact with mainframes.
- Accelerate adoption of Zowe in cloud‑native ecosystems like Red Hat OpenShift.
- Foster new contributions and plug‑ins in the Go ecosystem, enhancing the Zowe community.
Looking ahead, developing and integrating Go SDK support into Zowe’s conformance tests and exploring gRPC or WebSocket extensions could further optimize performance and developer productivity.
I’m excited to continue under the guidance of Zoran Krleža, and I welcome feedback and collaboration from the community as we push mainframe modernization forward.
Feel Free to reach out and connect with me at:
Linkedin | GitHub | Fosstodon | Website | X | Medium | Linux Foundation Mentorship | Mail
