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Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

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21–29 of 29 posts

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#21
post #10

It's a haphazard half-baked re-implementation of a lot of mainframe ideas with an extra helping of YAML and more rent extraction schemes. Plus it lets a whole generation think they invented these things (virtualization, containers, orchestration, containerized deployment, dynamic block storage, ingress/egress controllers, terminal aggregators, ...). Now that people are getting sick of cloud I'm sure we are going to r…

How can it possibly be more rent extracting than the mainframe?

Also openness, choice of vendor, invisible hardware and virtually unlimited scalability are different.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#22
The article implies that Cloud is bad in the same way that Mainframe was bad. But I think we need to distinguish between the technology (HTTP-based, public internet services) and the business model (subscription-based SaaS). The latter may be bad in some cases, but the technology is here to stay. No one is going back to proprietary client-server systems.

In fact, I think we can learn from the Mainframe. Mainframes had a much more cohesive and unified platform. I wish we could write a unified program (not a decoupled frontend/backend) and have it run on an abstract, scalable substrate (which happens to be implemented on a distributed system).

Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this a while back:

Rise of the Hyperplatforms: https://gridwhale.medium.com/rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a1...

GridWhale and a Brief History of Computing: https://gridwhale.medium.com/gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-o...

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#23
post #8

IBM Mainframe was an answer when computers couldn't vertical scale fast enough. Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. So, the real question is: can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer or on a set of computers with low enough cost to render Cloud unnecessary?

Cloud was actually the answer to "how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins." The rest is noise. Startups aside, most enterprise teams match the following: apps don't need to scale massively (scale up is enough and a surprising number of large, well-knwon services are entirely based on scale-up architectures behind the facade), most don't need dynamic sca…

> how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins

I put these into the bucket of productivity and low cost. And this issue arises when we need to scale our business, in particular our computation.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud was actually the answer to "how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins." The rest is noise. Startups aside, most enterprise teams match the following: apps don't need to scale massively (scale up is enough and a surprising number of large, well-knwon services are entirely based on scale-up architectures behind the facade), most don't need dynamic sca…

> how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins I put these into the bucket of productivity and low cost. And this issue arises when we need to scale our business, in particular our computation.

It's not really true though. Incremental expansion doesn't actually require more heads if the compute is uniform.

I should really have mentioned storage. Networking is a vendor-imposed shitshow, but storage, storage is next level. It's almost like the vendors in 1995-2020 actively built their products around spite and hate for their customers.

To me it is interesting that despite the massive economic advantage that vendors _should_ have, they've made their products so unusable that people will pay 3x-10x more just to not have to deal with them, which is what cloud amounts to for enterprise customers.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#28
Calling cloud computing "the new mainframe" is a bit of an understatement. One of the design goals of Multics was to establish computation as a sort of public utility, just like water or sewer or electric services; cloud providers seem to be filling that exact role, and I feel like it's only a matter of time before municipalities start establishing their own local cloud providers as public utilities.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#29
post #8

IBM Mainframe was an answer when computers couldn't vertical scale fast enough. Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. So, the real question is: can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer or on a set of computers with low enough cost to render Cloud unnecessary?

The answer is the classic desktop model, local first than "connected" (these days we would use more the synced term instead). Meaning some do NOT want people own their digital infra and know the power it give for business reasons, meaning big money. While most to not even know what they can do with their own "endpoints" or modern dumb terminals that actually do have much more power than old dumb terminals and they cost much as well.

The answer is "hey users did you know that you can have GMail on your iron? All you need is to pull messages from a server to your local maildirs and run a local indexer with the relevant UI. If you do that perhaps with a personal domain you can change the provider or be yourself the provider without change NOTHING nor the UI nor the addresses/aliases. YOU WON YOUR DAMN DATA". Or as well "hey, did you know you can damn work with some files locally than have them auto-sync-ed back to the server? It's easy. And so on.

The answer is that we need damn desktops also in hw, meaning not using craptops as desktop replacer no matter if docked with a decent screen(s) and input devices or masochistically used directly on their small bad keyboards and small screens. We need the concept of home-office and tools to be on-the-go ONLY when we need them, we need the concept of a damn homeserver per home, to host personal services in an IPv6 internet with a static global per device (allowing privacy extensions, but still knowing a static address if needed) and so on.

Unfortunately most people do not care until they discover they are trapped and that's too late because they use walled gardens and there is not much modern sw to work in the classic way while few profit from the most and to their best to avoid such knowledge.

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