> It should not be an acceptable practice to just insert a CD and indiscriminately install software onto a production machine. Well, I can't even do that. Fir

> It should not be an acceptable practice to just insert a CD and indiscriminately install software onto a production machine. Well, I can't even do that. First, generating a "CD" is too much work. Second, not sure who in AWS or GCP I would have to talk to to get a CD in their datacenter - and once there, how to read it without drives. The equivalent of "inserting a CD" is pulling container images. And EVERYONE in engineering should be able to do that. Why? Because, if you have sane processes in place, such code will: - Be peer reviewed - Be built automatically. Unit tests, integration and whatever else needed (load?) will run automatically. - Go to some form of staging environment, where QA can do their jobs - Get moved to production, possibly with a canary, blue/green or what have you, and automated rollbacks if metrics start to get funky. > Nor should it be acceptable to just flip the switch and reboot the server We don't care if said servers are cattle. We shouldn't even care if those servers are part of a primary data store. PG has master/slave and we setup a pool in front of it which will manage connections. Same for other SQL systems. Other data stores will be inherently distributed and will not care much if a node is lost. > Indeed, months, sometimes years, can go by without having to power down and re-IPL the mainframe. Yeah, but why do I care? I do care that there are enough active servers to handle requests. I don't usually care about uptime, and we actually actively terminate older ones. > Security should not be the afterthought that it sometimes can be in the Windows world. Windows world... Most servers are not running Windows these days. But even if they are, security has improved a lot. > Ever wonder why there are no mainframe viruses? I have never seen a virus in the wild on a server in the cloud. Not even worms, if the security team is doing their jobs. > Oh, we may turn it on its side and tape a piece of paper on it bearing a phrase like “Do Not Shut Off – This is the Production Server” Holy. I don't know were this guy has been working before, but this is really bad. Ok, maybe PC servers won't be able to survive if the CPU goes up in smoke (but they are expected to survive if the PSU goes up), but nowadays, we don't care. Shoot a server, another will take its load. > The bottom line is that today’s distributed systems – that is, Linux, Unix, and Windows-based systems – typically do not deliver the stability, availability, security, or performance of mainframe systems. Says who? Most large companies created in the last decade are not running mainframes. The likes of Facebook, Netflix, even Google. And they are doing just fine. It is not clear that any outages could have been prevented by having a single point of failure, however robust it is. Sounds like the author should move _away_ from mainframes and look into what's been done as of the past couple of decades.