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I suspect a lot of mainframe development today is Java EE centered, for which there is an abundance of stuff on the web. During my vocational training, I did a
by krylon 4y ago
I suspect a lot of mainframe development today is Java EE centered, for which there is an abundance of stuff on the web.
During my vocational training, I did a bit of work with mainframes and found a forum back then I liked, but my work (and the forum) was mostly about sysadmin-stuff, and the little coding I did was in Perl.
There is a sizable library of RedBooks on IBM's web site somewhere, but again, the stuff I was interested in was about system administration.
A lot of the culture in the mainframe world developed a long time ago, and in relative isolation from the rest of the IT world, so I suspect by the time Stack Overflow became popular, their communities had already found other ways and places to mingle and pass knowledge on and around.
With hardware, software, and support contract being so expensive, and corporate culture being what it is, I also suspect the threshold to call up the the vendor for support instead of Stack Overflow is much lower than in most other areas.
(Most of this is speculation on my part, I only spend a few months in this fascinating corner of IT. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear to from someone with actual experience.)
- kitd 4y agoI suspect a lot of mainframe development today is Java EE centered, for which there is an abundance of stuff on the web. Indeed, and not just Java. zLinux runs a great many workloads on M/Fs these days, which looks a lot like a normal Linux env. Then ofc K8S/docker/etc can run on mainframes, presenting another layer of abstraction. Modern mainfame programming is just a question of getting to know a slightly different set of tools.
- dilyevsky 4y ago> Then ofc K8S/docker/etc can run on mainframes, presenting another layer of abstraction. wtf why even plow $$$ into hardware at that point?
- kitd 4y agoMainframes are more energy efficient for a given level of performance than an equivalent farm of servers. Additionally, the redundancy, hot-swapping, and resource utilisation is generally better. A corporation might well calculate that, for its typical workloads, mainframes make a better K8s platform in the long run than server farms.
- krylon 4y agoThere was a funny ad years back where an exec walks into the data center and finds it nearly empty after the young newbie has consolidated all of their servers into VMs running on a single z990. (In retrospect I notice there are no disk drives or tape drives to be seen, though.)
- dilyevsky 4y agoI find that claim pretty hard to believe tbh. Any actual benches published? It’s like Oracle claiming they are the shit but then actually not allowing any performance benching whatsoever. The 14nm process that they use to build those kinda leads me to believe it’s all marketing
- kitd 4y agoWhy should it be so hard to believe? A mainframe box is about the size of a rack of servers, and all the components are much more tightly integrated. Plus the utilisation on m/fs is much higher than on normal servers. I don't have benchmarks, but googling "mainframe energy efficiency" brings up a load of results, eg: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/mainframe-sustainability-green-it/ https://www.bmc.com/blogs/mainframe-sustainability-green-it/ https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/for-energy-savings-consider-a-mainframe/ https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/for-energy-savings-consid... https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparison/ https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparis...
- dilyevsky 4y agoThese all seems like pure marketing. I would love to see actual technical benchmark (this would also make prime HN material even today). Usually companies that actually think they have a performance edge publish those ;)
- krylon 4y agoThe hardware is badass. It only becomes cost-efficient when you need to scale far up, but then it is very good. The have been building and improving these machines for nearly 70 years now.
- dilyevsky 4y agoFord has been in business for longer still makes dogshit cars