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Running on AWS and doing it correctly so that one of the many regional outages does not cause you an issue is really hard and is a software problem. On the othe

Running on AWS and doing it correctly so that one of the many regional outages does not cause you an issue is really hard and is a software problem. On the other hand using a system of tested proven code that runs on a system that is redundant by design at the lowest level of component (a mainframe cluster) where the software does not have to have knowledge of the redundancy is a bit simpler. I really think people miss this very important point. Redundancy is transparent for 99.9999% of the software you run on the old big iron systems. For something like a modern application on AWS you have to know, understand and code for the infrastructure.

openasocket 10y ago
We're talking about two different issues here. First is the architecture/software of a mainframe system, with all of its redundancy and scaling. Second is the issue of hosting and maintaining your own hardware. On the first issue I'll admit I don't know enough about mainframes, perhaps they provide redundancy transparently to the programmer, but I'm a bit skeptical. Perhaps you simply think the redundancy is transparent because you understand the mainframe infrastructure deeply and internalized it? The second issue I'll push back on. If you just want to host your servers on EC2, the SLA is 99.95% uptime. So that's about 4 hours of downtime due to outage a year. Put your servers in a multi-AZ autoscaling group and you're pretty solid. Bonus points for having autoscaling groups in more than one region. If you don't want to use any of the other services AWS provides, you can simply use them as a basic hosting service and get pretty amazing uptime. I've never used an old mainframe system, can you get greater uptime than that? Including hardware failures, power outages, network outages?
- myrandomcomment 10y ago
  There was one point in my life when I was working for a large mainframe company ;) A bank wanted to move a system to a new site. The uptime on that system was 11 years. Uptime on a mainframe system is pretty much considered 100% 4 hours downtime a year is just way to much for some systems. Just have a google for "mainframe uptime". Yes the software is abstracted from the HW redundancy. You can pull CPUs with running code in systems and things keep working. Really - walk up and pull the CPU out. No impact to running code. Heck you can run your private cloud on one: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-ibm-is-still-building-mainframes.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-...

openasocket 10y ago

We're talking about two different issues here. First is the architecture/software of a mainframe system, with all of its redundancy and scaling. Second is the issue of hosting and maintaining your own hardware. On the first issue I'll admit I don't know enough about mainframes, perhaps they provide redundancy transparently to the programmer, but I'm a bit skeptical. Perhaps you simply think the redundancy is transparent because you understand the mainframe infrastructure deeply and internalized it? The second issue I'll push back on. If you just want to host your servers on EC2, the SLA is 99.95% uptime. So that's about 4 hours of downtime due to outage a year. Put your servers in a multi-AZ autoscaling group and you're pretty solid. Bonus points for having autoscaling groups in more than one region. If you don't want to use any of the other services AWS provides, you can simply use them as a basic hosting service and get pretty amazing uptime. I've never used an old mainframe system, can you get greater uptime than that? Including hardware failures, power outages, network outages?

myrandomcomment 10y ago
There was one point in my life when I was working for a large mainframe company ;) A bank wanted to move a system to a new site. The uptime on that system was 11 years. Uptime on a mainframe system is pretty much considered 100% 4 hours downtime a year is just way to much for some systems. Just have a google for "mainframe uptime". Yes the software is abstracted from the HW redundancy. You can pull CPUs with running code in systems and things keep working. Really - walk up and pull the CPU out. No impact to running code. Heck you can run your private cloud on one: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-ibm-is-still-building-mainframes.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-...