In our second conversation of our “I Am A Mainframer” interview series, Jeffrey Frey talks with Emily K. Hugenbruch, OpenStack Cloud Enablement Engineer, z/VM and Software Engineer at IBM about the OpenStack Newton release and her overall career experience as a woman working in the mainframe space.
The conversation is sponsored by the Open Mainframe Project. As a Linux Foundation Project, the Open Mainframe Project is intended to help create a mainframe focus, open-source technical community and to serve as a focal point for the development and use for enterprise Linux and a Mainframe computing environment.
The goal of the project is to excite the Linux community around the use of the mainframe and to foster collaboration across mainframe community and develop and exploit shared Linux tool sets, resources, and services within the mainframe environment. In addition, the project seeks to involve the participation of academic institutions to help assist in creating educational programs aimed at developing the mainframe Linux engineers and developers of tomorrow. …
Jeffrey: Emily what do you think the biggest challenges are for the mainframe going forward. We’ve talked a lot about, you know, what we’re doing here to enable the platform. What do you see as the challenges in front of you?
Emily: I think one of our biggest challenges is really talking about what cloud means, and especially now that we’re getting into container technologies, how a lot of times those container technologies and how they interact with projects like OpenStack are still not very well defined yet. So when you add the in the extra layer of Z systems then that’s an extra challenge of how should these things interact? What do we need to do to make sure that our customers are happy with them, that they like how these things fit together and that it’s easy to put together.
There are a lot of things that you can do if you play around and really hack it but when we’re talking about the mainframe, our customers want something that’s very reliable, very easy, straightforward to put together and very well thought out and backed up by IBM so yeah, there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done with defining that interaction.
Read more at Open Mainframe Project
