In this part of the book, we introduce the user to IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) Transaction Server (CICS TS) platforms, applications, and policies, through the use of worked examples, which the user can follow.

Chapter 3, “Creating a platform” on page 25 demonstrates how a CICS TS platform can be used to simplify the management of a set of CICS TS regions to which an application is to be deployed. Regions are grouped into region types, based on the role that those regions perform. Regions can be quickly added or removed to a region type within a platform, to scale up or scale down the platform.

Chapter 4, “Creating an application” on page 51 introduces the CICS TS application, and demonstrates how a CICS TS application can be created for an existing user application, without change to the user’s application. The CICS TS application enables monitoring at the application level. It enables threshold policies to be applied to the application, to ensure that the application behaves as expected, and that it provides a single point of management and control of the application’s lifecycle.

Chapter 5, “Applying a policy” on page 97 demonstrates how threshold policies can be applied to an application or a platform, to ensure that the applications behave according to policy, and to enforce that behavior if required.

Chapter 6, “Packaging an application for multiversion deployment” on page 127 demonstrates how to enable multiple instances of the same application to be available on the same CICS TS platform at the same time, enabling roll-out of a new application version without any downtime, and providing a quick way to roll back to the previous application version if required.