How Time Machine® Helps Atruvia Succeed in IBM Mainframe Modernization

Topic:

Mainframe modernization is rarely confined to the mainframe itself.

Today’s enterprise applications typically span multiple platforms: core business logic may continue to run on IBM Z, while customer-facing applications, APIs, microservices, databases, and integration services operate across distributed systems and container platforms.

That means successful modernization requires end-to-end testing across both worlds.

Atruvia AG, the digitalization partner of Germany’s cooperative banking sector, provides a strong real-world example.

Modern Mainframes Are Part of a Much Larger Application Landscape

IBM’s Atruvia success story (https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/atruvia-ag) describes a hybrid architecture in which core banking services run on IBM zSystems, with IMS handling transaction processing and Db2 for z/OS managing data, while customer-facing applications run in Java on x86 Linux systems and the Red Hat OpenShift container platform.

Around 1,200 microservices support Atruvia’s sales platform and other processes, consuming core banking services through an API layer.

The mainframe may remain at the center of critical transaction processing, but the business transaction no longer begins and ends there.

Testing therefore cannot stop at the mainframe boundary.

Atruvia’s OpenShift Challenge

Atruvia operates one of the world’s largest Red Hat OpenShift environments, with more than 16,000 CPU cores and approximately 1,300 namespaces, together with a sophisticated service mesh. This container environment is tightly integrated with mainframe applications, databases, and web servers.

That scale makes integration testing challenging by itself. Date and time-sensitive business logic makes it significantly harder.

Banking applications must be tested against scenarios such as year-end processing, future effective dates, reporting periods, expiration dates, and other time-dependent business events. At the same time, mainframe test environments may operate at a different business date from the actual system clock.

For an end-to-end test to remain valid, the distributed and containerized applications interacting with those systems must see the same logical business time.

Changing physical system clocks across an OpenShift cluster is neither practical nor desirable.

Bringing Time Travel to the Container Side

Atruvia addressed this challenge with Solution-Soft’s Time Machine.

Time Machine provides virtual clocks to selected applications and OpenShift workloads without changing the underlying operating system clock. Atruvia can therefore move groups of selected namespaces to the required date and time (matching the mainframe time) while leaving unrelated workloads unaffected.

The Time Machine OpenShift Operator automates deployment and configuration, while OpenShift labels identify workloads that require virtual time. The Time Machine Sync Server API allows time control to be incorporated directly into DevSecOps and CI/CD automation, and the Floating License Server supports dynamic scaling as Time Machine-enabled pods are created.

Most importantly, the container environment can remain synchronized with dependent mainframe and distributed systems during end-to-end testing.

The result was substantial: Atruvia reduced time-critical testing cycles that previously took approximately six months to just three to four days.

Time Is an End-to-End Dependency

The lesson for mainframe modernization projects is straightforward.

Modernizing COBOL, introducing Java, exposing APIs, or moving application components to OpenShift changes the architecture, but it does not remove the dependencies between platforms.

If a business transaction crosses IBM Z, APIs, microservices, containers, databases, and external systems, all of those components must be tested together under realistic conditions.

Time is one of those Conditions

For date and time-sensitive applications, the ability to time travel only on the mainframe side is therefore not enough. The OpenShift and distributed side must be able to follow the same virtual timeline.

Atruvia demonstrates how that can be achieved at enterprise scale, bringing synchronized virtual time into a highly complex OpenShift environment while preserving the stability of the underlying infrastructure.

For a deeper look at Atruvia’s mainframe modernization strategy, including its use of Java alongside COBOL in IMS and the integration between IBM zSystems and distributed applications, see IBM’s Atruvia AG success story.

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About Time Machine:

Software Virtual Clocks for Time Travel Testing. Simulate past and future dates effortlessly with Time Machine, enabling comprehensive testing of your date- and time-sensitive applications. Ideal for validating critical business processes like quarter-end and year-end processing, billing cycles, regulatory compliance (including Year 2038), and policy lifecycles during integration, upgrades, virtualization, cloud migration, and containerization. Eliminate the risks and downtime associated with system clock resets in complex environments like Active Directory and Kerberos.

About Solution-Soft:

Solution-Soft has been at the forefront of virtual clock software and time travel testing solutions since 1997 to empower companies in the ever-evolving digital world. Our flagship product, Time Machine®, has revolutionized application testing, enabling companies, including many of Fortune 100, to reduce costs and accelerate project delivery by an average of 3 – 10 times across enterprise and containerized systems to run critical software and application testing.

The Time Machine Product Suite extends these capabilities, optimizing cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOps, and containerization testing. Time Machine for Containers supports standalone Docker containers, and large-scale Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters (including the world’s largest 16,000+ CPU core cluster, 1,300+ namespace deployments with CI/CD test automation.)

Trusted by over thousands of installed base worldwide across diverse industries, including AIG, Australian Tax Office, Atruvia, AMEX, BBC, Boeing, CVS, Discover, Lloyds Bank, National Grid, SNCF, State of CA, ID, HI, MO, OH, NC, and more. We partner with industry leaders like Accenture, Deloitte, DXC, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle providing cutting-edge solutions for all time travel testing and simulator training needs.

Solution-Soft was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.