What technologies should I learn?

My answer to this question is purely from the perspective of a mainframe developer aspiring to become a technical architect utilizing their mainframe expertise.

I have listed down some most essential technologies to learn from in-platform and outside mainframes.



In Platform:

  1. Inventory analysis - ADDI is an inventory analysis tool that forms the basis for most modernization initiatives. It is essential to understand what kind of analysis may be needed for different types of modernization roadmaps. There are other products too from non-IBM vendors.
  2. DevOps on Mainframe - explore the different DevOps patterns and pipelines and find out how it helps developers, system programmers, managers and deployment teams. Currently, the adoption levels may be slow, but I am almost certain that in 5 years using DevOps will become a norm in mainframe surely.
  3. z/OS Connect - if you are exposing your application as an API to non-mainframe applications, the likelihood of using z/OS Connect is high. This is a very essential component that serves the need for hybrid cloud architectures and integrations to digital channels from mainframe.
  4. CICS gateway - An Alternative to z/OS connect. There are ways to configure CICS and use it as a gateway for interacting with cloud and distributed applications.
  5. IMS gateway - Like CICS gateway, this is for the IMS transaction server.
  6. DB2 IDAA - This is a product that can help do analytics in real-time for the DB2 data. This will be useful if there is a need in your organization for analyzing real-time data for making business decisions. 
  7. Integration/extension options from other vendors - There are other non-IBM alternatives for integrations provided by vendors like Software AG, Broadcomm, Serena, etc. It’s good to know them as well in case your customer uses one of them already. 

Other platforms:

  1. Java, Javascript, Python - Choose to learn at least one of these languages. They all have different purposes and fitment. Understand which scenario these languages are best useful when learning.
  2. One cloud platform - Choose one of AWS, Azure, Google or IBM cloud platforms. Start from the basics of cloud computing and learn the concepts of Kubernetes and microservices. It doesn't really matter what cloud platform you choose to learn. The key is to know the underlying concepts. Most of the services provided by one cloud provider are always invariably provided with another name by another provider. So stop thinking too much about which one to choose.
  3. Enterprise product (situational) - If your organization uses ERP, CRM or other products specializing in a specific domain extensively, you can consider learning that too. Examples will be SAP, Salesforce, etc.
  4. Architectural patterns: There are several IT architecture patterns that are used to build and run applications. This book is a good starting point to explore further.  

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