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> If they were babied as much as the COBOL systems (no changes without months of testing, if data comes in in an incompatible format then we preprocess it...) t
by hakfoo 5y ago
> If they were babied as much as the COBOL systems (no changes without months of testing, if data comes in in an incompatible format then we preprocess it...) then I'd expect them to last longer.
I'm skeptical on a pure hardware basis.
Your classic mainframe was a very expensive piece of kit and outfitted as such. Everything redundant, self-monitoring, and hot swappable. The hardware support and backwards compatibility runs into the decades.
Today we're renting a cloud service, that's made of pig-in-a-poke hardware. Reliable/high availability hardware is simulated with a bunch of disposable instances, at the cost of needing to design systems at the software level to sync and preserve data rather than having it built into the hardware.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if I can snapshot an AWS/Azure/GCP image today, and fire it up in 2041 with no changes. (Hell, we have no assurances they'll be offering native x86-64 hardware in 20 years)
- lmm 5y ago> Today we're renting a cloud service, that's made of pig-in-a-poke hardware. Reliable/high availability hardware is simulated with a bunch of disposable instances, at the cost of needing to design systems at the software level to sync and preserve data rather than having it built into the hardware. Right, but Kafka's already set up to do that. I've worked on Zookeeper clusters that have been continuously up for 10 years - not the individual hardware, but the overall system was continuously available for all that time. > I'd be pleasantly surprised if I can snapshot an AWS/Azure/GCP image today, and fire it up in 2041 with no changes. (Hell, we have no assurances they'll be offering native x86-64 hardware in 20 years) We'll be able to emulate them, and even if not, the Kafka stack is all JVM-based, so you don't need x86 to run it.