Cloud enablement with platforms, applications and policies

Use platforms, applications, and policies to increase your service agility, and move towards a service delivery platform for cloud computing.

For agile service delivery, CICS® resources are packaged together, hosted as applications on a platform, and managed dynamically with policies. Delivered in this way, the resources can be moved through their lifecycle with greater ease and flexibility, so that you can respond to changes in business and end user requirements with increased speed and confidence.

A platform consists of a number of logically related CICS regions. CICS regions with similar properties are grouped together in region types in a platform. You can create new region types and CICS region definitions to use in the platform, and you can also adopt existing CICS system groups (CSYSGRPs) and CICS regions as region types in the platform. A platform can include both created region types and adopted region types. CICS regions in a platform can be initialized or shut down individually if necessary, for example, to meet fluctuations in capacity requirements.

Platforms provide services and resources so that applications can be rapidly deployed based on their requirements. You can create an application bundle to package the components of CICS applications for deployment on a platform. The CICS bundles for each component of the application are installed in suitable CICS regions in the platform when you install the application. You can install and manage multiple versions of an application at the same time on the same platform instance. You can update, monitor and measure, and remove the application as a unit, and the installed resources for the application are managed automatically through the platform.

Platforms can be managed dynamically by applying policies during runtime. You can define policies to limit and control the amount of resources that a task can acquire. You can deploy policies with a scope of a platform, an application, or an individual operation within an application.

You use the CICS Cloud perspective in the CICS Explorer® to create and manage platforms, applications, and policies.