| >What does Paypal, Klarna, or even maybe Amazon give up by not using mainframes? Simplicity. Because instead of having an enormous team to maintain their multi-million line Kubernetes configuration files that automatically spawns thousands of servers, having an enormous team that tries to fix the CAP problem, you go grab IBM, you tell them "this mainframe goes down, you're dead, here's half a billion in cash" and you run all of your software on a single, massive machine. Sure, it adds other problems, but to be fair I'd rather deal with a mainframe than yet another microservice that doesn't work because Omega Star doesn't handle ISO timestamps and it blocks Galactus >Does any company founded in the last 10-15-20 years use mainframes? The biggest issue with mainframes are: - High initial costs (although that's been changing) - Nobody knows how to work on IBM Z mainframes - The current zeitgeist about having a billion servers spread throughout the world because it's really important to have an edge CDN server for your cat trading card game These industries didn't care about that because they could absorb these high initial costs, had the knowledge of the people building the mainframes, and were already highly centralized. Decentralization just adds more problems, it doesn't fix anything. >I think it's much more in the inertia-point, the cost of rewriting these enormous applications is simply too large. Rewriting just because it's not following the latest trend is garbage. These applications work. They're not going to work better because you're using Spanner now. |