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The biggest drawback is that it's inflexible, slow to work on and pretty much the definition of proprietary. Everything is a secret, everything has as much red

The biggest drawback is that it's inflexible, slow to work on and pretty much the definition of proprietary. Everything is a secret, everything has as much red tape as a lawyers office and nobody wants to share.

ASalazarMX 7y ago
Slow to work on? Oh no, you didn't. I'd even contest it's more productive, as the developments tools come preinstalled and they integrate seamlessly with the platform. It isn't as flexible as a PC, but you shouldn't expect it to. You learn the design, conventions and idiosyncrasy of the platform and work with them, not against them.
- oneplane 7y ago
  Slow as in you can't do as many release cycles on it as say, a distributed cluster. We're hosting about 700 services with about 6 instances each and release each of them multiple times a day. That's about 4000 production releases a day with no downtime, errors, or security issues. Includes rollbacks, roll forwards, AB-tests, versioned releases etc. No mainframes anymore either, and for 10% of the cost. Maybe this isn't the general standard, or maybe this wouldn't work for multinationals or companies/workforces with different values, but it works here. I suppose it also depends on what your company is doing; we're in fast moving online retail, if you are in a slower operating environment (i.e. only doing batch processing or bulk messaging with ETL of different kinds) where changes aren't giving you an edge over competition if must be a different set of operational requirements too.
Shivetya 7y ago
the iSeries or just mainframes in general? Certainly not the i. There is so much documentation that it might be more of an issue of it being overwhelming. there are multiple active communities sharing code. this is a system which is based on DB2 meaning SQL in native, development tools are varied, from COBOL, RPGLE, JAVA, and more. You can web face nearly any existing process, node.js work is one area we have lots of current work. no down time for reorganizing files, indexes always maintained, and tools open to all on the platform to optimize sql statements. I have developers using all this and more. most use an eclipse based platform (RDi for Cobol/RPGLE) or eclipse itself to work. admin wise it is a breeze, no need to hunt down a tcp/ip stack, db tools, schedulers, or such. its all built in. Legacy systems are only limited by the imagination of those using them. the reason the systems persist and grow is because they are not frozen in time and their architecture readily adapts to new technology because they were designed to not be locked down with an inflexible design.

ASalazarMX 7y ago

Slow to work on? Oh no, you didn't. I'd even contest it's more productive, as the developments tools come preinstalled and they integrate seamlessly with the platform. It isn't as flexible as a PC, but you shouldn't expect it to. You learn the design, conventions and idiosyncrasy of the platform and work with them, not against them.

oneplane 7y ago
Slow as in you can't do as many release cycles on it as say, a distributed cluster. We're hosting about 700 services with about 6 instances each and release each of them multiple times a day. That's about 4000 production releases a day with no downtime, errors, or security issues. Includes rollbacks, roll forwards, AB-tests, versioned releases etc. No mainframes anymore either, and for 10% of the cost. Maybe this isn't the general standard, or maybe this wouldn't work for multinationals or companies/workforces with different values, but it works here. I suppose it also depends on what your company is doing; we're in fast moving online retail, if you are in a slower operating environment (i.e. only doing batch processing or bulk messaging with ETL of different kinds) where changes aren't giving you an edge over competition if must be a different set of operational requirements too.

Shivetya 7y ago

the iSeries or just mainframes in general? Certainly not the i. There is so much documentation that it might be more of an issue of it being overwhelming. there are multiple active communities sharing code. this is a system which is based on DB2 meaning SQL in native, development tools are varied, from COBOL, RPGLE, JAVA, and more. You can web face nearly any existing process, node.js work is one area we have lots of current work. no down time for reorganizing files, indexes always maintained, and tools open to all on the platform to optimize sql statements. I have developers using all this and more. most use an eclipse based platform (RDi for Cobol/RPGLE) or eclipse itself to work. admin wise it is a breeze, no need to hunt down a tcp/ip stack, db tools, schedulers, or such. its all built in. Legacy systems are only limited by the imagination of those using them. the reason the systems persist and grow is because they are not frozen in time and their architecture readily adapts to new technology because they were designed to not be locked down with an inflexible design.