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That doesn't make it thriving though. It's a niche that continues to get smaller, albeit at a very slow rate.
by paol 6y ago
That doesn't make it thriving though. It's a niche that continues to get smaller, albeit at a very slow rate.
- meepmorp 6y agoTheir anecdata beats your unsourced generalization.
- kjs3 6y agoNo, mine is anecdata too, just more of it. And neither wins because there's actual data out there about the size and velocity of the mainframe market. I just don't much care to look it up every time someone makes an unfounded declaration that mainframes are dead. And, since we're keeping score, zero content snark is bottom of the heap.
- meepmorp 6y agoI was saying your anecdata beats the other guy. I definitely agree the mainframe ain't dead. > And, since we're keeping score, zero content snark is bottom of the heap. That's just hurtful, man.
- Guest42 6y agoI think the difference is that the mainframe isn’t going anywhere and the large companies themselves have been thriving and will likely continue to do so. My employer has a number of them and they work great although it’s challenging to find the developers. If it was my decision to migrate I’d be hesitant because it seems as though infrastructure is priced low enough to convince people to switch but then will likely creep up over time in either prices or lock-in.
- kjs3 6y agoI don't dispute that; every niche has a growth phase and a decline phase. See: Minicomputers or RISC workstations. However, given a nearly 60 year run so far, and an expectation that there's a couple more decades of life it it, we should be so lucky if whatever niche we work in 'fails to thrive' like that.
- wbl 6y agoThe replacement for a RISC workstation was an Intel one serving the same role for the same kind of customer. The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.
- zozbot234 6y ago> The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path. Datacenter-scale compute on non-proprietary platforms (e.g. leveraging OCP standards and best practices, which have been developed w/ significant input from FAANG and 'cloud' vendors) can easily tackle any mainframe workload. The implied path is obvious.
- monocasa 6y agoYes, and you can see the mainframe origins in the modern cloud. It was funny to see the predecessor to Kubernetes (Borg) had a language that was even a wink and a nod to JCL called BCL that then evolved into Kubernetes's resource config files. That being said, it takes a massive commitment and pretty much a rewrite from scratch to achieve a jump from mainframe to modern DC. You need to embrace individual node failure and that's not something you can just hack in.
- shrubble 6y agoCan you provide an example of a company that migrated their mainframe based highly-available transactions oriented workload, to what you mention?
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThis is actually a good comment - look at a datacenter and squint, and tell me - is it not justa a new mainframe? AWS, Azure and GCP are all proprietary, and all are producing larger and larger servers and VMs. They are basically rentable, virtualised mainframes at this point
- rbanffy 6y agoAlso note Apple is transitioning their Unix workstation line back to RISC.