Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#1

Post by as17237 » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:09 PM UTC

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#2

Post by dusted » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:32 PM UTC

Give it a bit of time, and mainframe become the new cloud, but only after a cycle of "everything on site[1]". This is not an industry that learns from the past when scrap can be acquired by relentless fashion grifting.

[1] Edited as I discovered that premises is not simply plural of premise [2]

[2] English is not my first language

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#3

Post by hprotagonist » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:33 PM UTC

Hasn't this been obvious for a decade or more?

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#4

Post by mxuribe » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:37 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

Hasn't this been obvious for a decade or more?

Perhaps obvious for you and I (and some others too), but not for everyone...Because i'll make the assumption that you and I (and some others too) are living in the future. But, like the saying goes: the future is already here, its merely unequally distributed...Or something like that. ;-)

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#5

Post by zwieback » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

No, mainframe had almost exclusively dumb clients, at most some local display trickery but cloud is way, way more distributed. I think the main point is valid though: distribution of SW is now much easier, the stacks of floppies of my youth are luckily a faint memory.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#6

Post by bytearray » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:49 PM UTC

Cloud is the new mainframe, Kubernetes is the new job manager, microservices are the new COBOL.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#7

Post by moandcompany » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:54 PM UTC

In many cases its the new mainframe, but with more opaque, and as a consequence more fragile, abstractions

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#8

Post by g9yuayon » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 8:58 PM UTC

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?

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#9

Post by johnklos » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 9:01 PM UTC

For all the redundancies that exist, "cloud" isn't reliable and therefore can't replace the mainframe. Then again, most things don't need mainframe level reliability, which is why Microsoft Teams (and other Microsoft services) is problematic today.

Re: Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

#10

Post by api » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 9:02 PM UTC

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 re-invent personal computing now with entirely new terminology and re-implementation of all the original ideas. Just please no YAML.