z/OS 2.5 Preview & New IBM Z Container Image Registry

It's been a great start to 2021 and an exciting week for the Z platform as we've made two significant announcements to further IBM's commitment to Hybrid Cloud transformation for our clients.

z/OS 2.5 Preview Announcement

Firstly we've issued the preview announce of z/OS 2.5 which you can read here. As many will know, we issue the preview announce ahead of the full announce of z/OS 2.5 to give our clients time for planning, such that they're able to unlock the value of the release faster when it becomes available later in the year, but more than that this release of z/OS 2.5 is packed with capabilities to help you modernize your applications and deploy new cloud native workloads, enhance your cyber security and improve business and IT resiliency.

Not only that but you can find enhancement to exploitation for the IBM Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort (exclusive to IBM z15), improvements in Cloud Provisioning and Management, install and update experience, and a range of new capabilities in zOSMF delivering a more efficient experience with less skills needed for a range of activities. There will be even more to come with z/OS 2.5 that we'll be announcing later in the year, so watch this space for further announcements.

Trusted Registry

In particular one capability that has been gaining massive traction since we launched it in z/OS 2.4 is zCX (or z/OS Container Extensions), which provides the capability to deploy Linux container workloads in a z/OS address space. This gives you all of the benefits of deploying open source packages on the Z platform, while inheriting the market leading security, resilience and availability you've come to expect with z/OS. One aspect our clients have becoming increasingly interested in is ensuring that the packages they deploy in their hybrid cloud can be trusted, as highlighted by the recent 'Dependency Confusion' attack.

Its with that that we're pleased to have made available an Early Access Program for the IBM Z Container Image Registry, which provides a trusted mechanism for accessing pre-built open source images free of charge. A few highlights include... 

• Pre-built images by IBM from source - they are not assembled from images hosted at other registries. 
• Images are scanned for known vulnerabilities and a report can be seen for each image.
• sha256 hash strings are published for each image to verify authenticity of image content.

There are over 50 images already uploaded for you to go an experience with more on the way soon. For a more detailed write-up you can read this great blog by Joe Bostian or you can go direct and sign-up for the Early Access Program right here