The IBM z/OS® Provisioning Toolkit is a simple command line utility for the rapid provisioning of z/OS development environments. 

Application developers can provision and de-provision z/OS applications in minutes—without requiring any z/OS specific administration skills—reducing time to delivery. System programmers can easily manage the provisioning process by preconfiguring the environments, control developer access through z/OS security and set appropriate provisioning limits.

The toolkit is fully supported and available to all IBM z/OS V2 clients at no additional charge.

Features

• **‘Images’ that match production environments: **Design environments with all the resources a developer needs to test their applications effectively. Create as many ‘images’ as you need and easily share them across your teams. These images can contain code, configuration and environment variables.
• **Easy management of provisioned ‘containers’: **Developers can stop and restart their containers or just remove them completely using simple commands. Containers can easily be re-created from the same image. The number of running containers is limited by the operations team. System programmers can manage all the containers across the organization, regardless of who created them.
• **Rapid provisioning and de-provisioning: **Run an image by using a single command to create a ‘container’—a provisioned instance of the image—providing a pre-configured runtime environment for a developer within minutes. Developers can stop and start the environment, then remove it when no longer required.
• **Template-based access controls: **Access can be granted to specific users or groups by using a template. The template is used to set specific limits on the maximum number of environments that can be provisioned and the maximum for each user—enabling the system programmer to control the resources consumed by the development environments.

Benefits

• **Become more efficient: **Enable developers to provision environments as needed with automation—reducing the burden of managing development and test systems and reliance on operations staff.
• **Provision with control: **Provide pre-configured environments by using workflows, control access with z/OS security and limit the number of provisioned environments.
• **Simplify with a common language: **Enable development and operations teams to speak the same language with standard terms such as ‘image’ and ‘container’—whether for CICS®, MQ, z/OS Connect or other environments.