I haven't used other mainframe solutions, but one of my favorite features of VMS is logicals. Logicals are environment variables backed by a clustered key value

I haven't used other mainframe solutions, but one of my favorite features of VMS is logicals. Logicals are environment variables backed by a clustered key value store that's safe to use for distributed locks. Logicals appear to your process in a hierarchy of tables that inherit from one another, by default you have: job (shell subprocess) > process (shell session) > user > group > system (node) > cluster. You can also build your own tables stored with which ever chosen locality (system, cluster, etc) in the hierarchy. Meaning if you follow "12-factor" design, well it didn't have fancy name then, you could do things change configuration cluster wide in an instant.