Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it. The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs. I can understand if yo…
I doubt they have too much COBOL lock-in, since the article notes their datacenter opened in 2008. Here's the thing: A mainframe may have spare capacity, but you still have to call IBM to unlock it. In order to make a Z run in a cost-effective manner, you need to run at 90%+ utilization at all times - which is excellent for batch jobs that can be scheduled, but is difficult to achieve with on-demand loads. You're pay…
Respectfully, the hell you say. Cloud 'autoscaling' is something that has to be tenderly maintained by software engineers, who expect to be paid salaries and benefits and so on. It's not like FedEx can just rsync their data into the cloud and have all their software run forever. Instead, they need the engineering team that manages their existing data workflows, and now they also need cloud engineers to translate that into something that won't bankrupt the company, since they're moving from the mainframe world (where you keep your system loaded to an efficient price point) to the cloud world (where you are billed by the second).
Moving your compute spend from capex to opex is a perfectly valid move, but pretending the reason is that someone has to make a phone call once in a while is kind of bizarre, when the alternative is having to hire a whole new cadre of techincal talent.