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The author ignores that large cloud providers design their own hardware. They are not using generic systems, but are designing their own. My own personal hypoth
by scott_s 5y ago
The author ignores that large cloud providers design their own hardware. They are not using generic systems, but are designing their own. My own personal hypothesis is that the "servers" that run the major clouds will converge on something that looks like mainframes.
They won't be mainframes, because as the author does correctly point out, mainframes are unmatched at large-scale, high throughput, resilient, stateful, transaction-heavy workloads. While that is part of what the major cloud providers support, it is not everything. Because it is not everything, the systems the major cloud providers design and build will look different from mainframes, but I think they will have key similarities: virtualization and security features provided by the hardware; high reliability through redundancy and in-hardware error-checking; easy physical maintenance through hot-swappable components.
- electroly 5y ago> high reliability through redundancy ... easy physical maintenance through hot-swappable components I don't think hyperscalers will ever care about this. They have millions of servers. They can just take the whole server out of commission as soon as it fails a health check. This is a critical difference between the mainframe model and the modern cloud model.
- kristjansson 5y agoYup - look at the sleds in the opencompute project, or the rack product Oxide is working on. Whole servers swap about as easily as hot-swap SATA trays
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago"They won't be mainframes, because as the author does correctly point out, mainframes are unmatched at large-scale, high throughput, resilient, stateful, transaction-heavy workloads." So like DynamoDB, Document DB, SQS, Service bus, and vast majority of managed cloud services? Thats literally the entire reason to use cloud - to offload management of statefull services. If I wanted just to run stateless docker containers, I can set that up myself on bare metal in a day.
- scott_s 5y agoNo, not like them. Those services are not handling the number of transactions a second, reliably, across a single database, as companies like Bank of America or Visa are.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoCould you elaborate please, what do you mean? Does VISA do more transactions than all of AWS combined? Is a single mainframe more reliable than the entire datacenter running AWS service? Is Bank of America's data literally a single SQL database?