Tried to edit my original comment because two people asked the same, but it didn't update, so I'll resume it here:
- No devops, you have real sysadmins whose priority is security and system administration, not development.
- Not relearning to invent the wheel every six months. The technology changes incrementally. If you get out of the field for a few years, read the "what's new" sections of the new manuals to catch up.
- Documentation. IBM docs are great, remind me of NASA docs. They have everything you need, you can go days without googling a problem.
- Backwards compatibility. Decades old sources can be compiled, decades old binaries can be run. Architecture changes are handled transparently.
- Simplicity. The interfaces might seem primitive compared to PC OSs, but there's also less complexity, and less attack surface.
- Uptime. Almost everything, including CPUs, is hot-swappable. This doesn't add to the joy, but it's remarkable.
You're spot on about simplicity, and it's the reason AWS may not remain the top cloud provider for much longer. There is no effort to implement any sort of consistency across their famed two-pizza teams -- that wouldn't be "Day one". So each service has its own IAM quirks, making basic security at scale a nightmare, and in some cases impossible.
Azure policies are comparatively a breeze, making it the smart and increasingly obvious choice for any regulated (read: large) corporation.
You don’t need to wrestle AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Spark, Aurora, etc… to run a batch job. The kinds of tasks that take integrating multiple different providers and software packages to do in cloud architecture are OS-level features on mainframe. It’s less flexible and more expensive, but an order less accidental complexity.
IBM is a dinosaur company that exists because of embedded connections in government, banking, and defense. They charge 100x the going rate for ancient tech that’s insecure and an absolute nightmare to develop for.
The sooner everyone drops anything associated with IBM or Oracle, the better for everyone. Absolute cancers.
- No devops, you have real sysadmins whose priority is security and system administration, not development.
- Not relearning to invent the wheel every six months. The technology changes incrementally. If you get out of the field for a few years, read the "what's new" sections of the new manuals to catch up.
- Documentation. IBM docs are great, remind me of NASA docs. They have everything you need, you can go days without googling a problem.
- Backwards compatibility. Decades old sources can be compiled, decades old binaries can be run. Architecture changes are handled transparently.
- Simplicity. The interfaces might seem primitive compared to PC OSs, but there's also less complexity, and less attack surface.
- Uptime. Almost everything, including CPUs, is hot-swappable. This doesn't add to the joy, but it's remarkable.