Support for Push-Only Traffic from IMS via z/OS Connect API Requester

We are seeing an increased requirement for the mainframe transactional systems to publish updates to distributed systems. Products like Change Data Capture allow us to do this for data that is logged to database or file (typically structured data). However, we also have business need to push non-critical ‘status’ updates to these distributed systems via API calls. This data typically is not logged for CDC to capture and these updates do not require certainty that they arrived at the endpoint. Additionally, the originating z/OS application is not dependent on the response back from the API to continue processing. We are using z/OS Connect to cater for this kind of workload at the moment but there are improvements that we would like to leverage to stop this non-critical traffic blocking customer-facing traffic, particularly in IMS message processing regions.

We are facing the need for new z/OS Connect functionality to allow API Requester responses to be issued back to the client IMS region by z/OS Connect upon receipt of a valid API call rather than waiting for the response from the configured Requester endpoint. The business objective of this new functionality would be to improve the response times for our customer-facing transactions in IMS by clearing non-critical 'status' update API traffic quicker. By decoupling the IMS transaction from the endpoint’s response, the IMS regions would experience reduced queueing, freeing them up for the processing of customer facing workload. Also, in scenarios where the endpoint that accepts these 'status' updates is performing poorly and responding slower than expected, IMS regions would not be affected by these slow-downs.