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by lsllc 2135 days ago
IBM should stop trying to copy AWS/Azure/GCP with their cloud offerings and instead offered a "mainframe" based cloud, they might get more traction. Customers could submit their COBOL/CICS jobs and just pay for the cpu milliseconds or I/O blocks used etc. getting the cloud scale and elasticity for a mainframe without having to actually "own" a mainframe. I guess that's where AWS is going with some of their ML & analytic offerings (batch oriented, but not mainframe based).
2 comments

The 'service bureau' does what you're talking about, and has done for a very long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_bureau#Histories

I have no idea about the current level of activity in this sector (mainframe proceesing as a service), but would not be at all surprised to find it greatly diminished from it's heyday when dinosaurs roamed the raised floor.

I don't think it takes a huge leap to draw a connection between these businesses and the cloud providers of today.

IBM cloud for learners itself not cheap that's the problem. But the thing is they cannot do it like that each software takes a huge load on the lpar/Plex and run as a subsystem. So cost of running a small stack itself will be huge. Now they got zVM don't know how effective that is, but currently it helps Devops process.

Generally Billing is in peak MIPS.