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I like seeing posts like this showing that there is still interest in operating with mainframes and bare-metal servers these days.

My biggest fear is that you are in the minority of developers that can single-handedly operate one in the age of buzzword-ridden lingo such as AWS, GCP, Heroku, etc which forces a dogma to run rampant in our industry to host all of your startup/company only on other peoples's servers rather than to setup up your own in-house bare-metal servers instead.

So I am very impressed to see this, as an added bonus it is a mainframe. Please post more of this.

5 comments

It's not about clouds. The problem is with mainframe manufacturers. Their prices are ridiculous, so no sane man with limited budgets would buy it. I can build incredible powerful server from a desktop or workstation components for a few thousand dollars. Probably can reduce it to hundreds with using old parts. I can increase price to x2 and buy some HP or Dell blade and that would be real server hardware. But nobody is going to increase price to x100 and buy mainframe. That's just too much.

Keep in mind that a lot of the people that are running mainframes now have been running them for many years (think 1980s), and there was no alternative that could run at the scale / speed / throughput that the mainframe can. So much of what we do today in the cloud can be attributed to the trails blazed by the mainframers. Fascinating technology.

IBM is dead until it gets a mainframe in AWS region data centers. Mainframe is still king of CA in CAP.

Last time I checked IBM was alive and doing well.

They’ve been in a 10+ year turnaround. “Doing well” is debatable.

The way I see it, cloud containers boil down to extending Java JEE like facilities to other stacks based on other languages.

If you look hard enough at Kubernetes - perhaps with a Kafka queue in the mix - it will turn into a big Websphere cluster and wave back.

> My biggest fear is that you are in the minority of developers that can single-handedly operate one

You're right. About 6 months ago the University of Canberra, Australia started it's 'Bachelor of Information Technology in Mainframe Computing' degree program because of the shortage.

It won't last forever...

I'm already hearing the term internally and within job postings -> 'repatriation'... bringing it back from AWS.

Yeah, it’s funny how much groupthink happens in businesses where you’d expect there to be purely rational decision making.

There will be a tipping point where the groupthink will switch back to prioritizing in-house data centers.

I am yet to do any major cloud deployment, most of our customers are very keen on having their data on their computers, not someone else's.

So we did some small stuff on AWS and Azure and that was all about it, in max 5 years time the fad will be on the down path.