[CanaryLayout]

If IBM weren't hostile to the Hercules project and allowed local licensing to run z/OS, CICS, IMS and DB2 on it, perhaps more hobbyists would want to careerpath themselves on to the s390 architecture.

I do love the s390 arch and the massive IO hardware over there, but IBM has paywalled down entry so hard that there is no audience.

They even went to the trouble of making Go binaries transportable for direct execution under z/OS. But if you want new people to write code on the platform you need to make access to the platform a thing.

[gnum4n]

Former P-series/AIX SME here. I agree 100%. IBM's training programs are a joke.

P-series and mainframe machines have a lot of cool tech, and they're very resilient. They can even lose a CPU or some RAM and keep running. x86 systems would more likely freeze/crash immediately.

But the only reason I know P-series/AIX at all is because one small branch of IBM hired me for my linux skills back in 2011, and I learned on the job. But I quit after 5 years, because the pay wasn't sustainable. The machines are too expensive to play around with otherwise. If you learn by doing (which seems vital to be a good sysadmin or programmer), even a license to use AIX is out of the hobbyist's price range. Training courses are limited lab environments. You won't get nearly as much out of that as you would from a 12-month AWS subscription, or a $5/month VPS, or an x86 virtual machine, or a raspberry pi. etc, etc.

And IBM ended their developer machine licensing. So now employers can't even afford to maintain extra P-series machines for devs/sysadmins to play around with and learn.

But don't worry, IBM will keep shooting their feet off until they no longer exist. There will likely be a panic, similar to Y2K, where everyone's feverishly re-writing and porting and emulating and migrating things off of IBM iron and onto x86 machines.

[bzzzt]

> They can even lose a CPU or some RAM and keep running.

That's also true for a Kubernetes cluster.

[gnum4n]

That is a very good point. Why buy big iron "pets" when you can buy x86 "cattle"? It works for a lot of stateless apps and services. A node dies, and k8s quickly moves the workloads to new nodes.

It does take some work to accomplish this on more complex apps, though. Things like SQL databases and rabbitmq are very often single points of failure in practice. At smaller companies, it's often easier to stick them on more resilient hardware than to architect an active/active or active/failover system. I agree that this isn't the best way to do it, and IMHO any important service should have HA of some sort.

That said, I use x86 based machines for all my personal projects, and I wouldn't buy IBM systems if I owned a tech startup just because they're like 10x the price of x86.

[toomuchtodo]

This is why they bought RedHat.

[pinewurst]

And now that they’re McKinsey-izing Redhat, one can see the IBM footgun is still firing away.

[1letterunixname]

IBM: Footgunning before the XT and before the Republican conformity dress code when it was cool to enable genocidal regimes for money. IBM is the quintessential big, dumb company that innovates in spurts and then is a perpetual loser because of all of its corporate bs.

[gnum4n]

And now that they bought RedHat, they're eagerly dropping support for all linux distros that are not RedHat, and they're attempting to lock out anyone who wants a personally affordable RedHat-like system (CentOS...). If they succeed, it may even be hard to find decent RedHat sysadmins in the future.

It's hard to keep up a trained workforce when they lock the doors so tight.

[1letterunixname]

Yep. In the greedy drive to monetize the Meta's and Motorola's running Cent to force them onto RHEL, they're pulling a grenade pin and daring people to stay in the boat. Instead, they're alienating most of their future business of potential users and decision makers by attempting to emulate a worse than Oracle while disrespecting their users.

The value in something like Cent/RHEL is LTS stability. Really, the only valuable part of Cent/RHEL is the stable kernel because the userland rapidly becomes old and useless. Something like Ubuntu with a RHEL quality kernel with a 10 yr support lifecycle but without a separate foss/commercial version would be superior to either RHEL or Ubuntu. Canonical went full shark-jumping mickeymouse with their "Pro" subscription and non patching model unless you pay $.

[CanaryLayout]

And no, the paywalled IBM Cloud LPARs are a joke.

The mainframe is not a special thing anymore, hasn't been since the late 90s. It's just a server box.

I work at a shop with a z/14. I would love it if we finished the last COBOL retirements and go back to the mainframe but this time to run container farms, fresh Go code, and use thr power to run way deeper matrices of tests that take days to run locally and cannot afford to run on AWS.

[CanaryLayout]

IBM could sell the future of the on premises z/xxx boxes as "datacenter in one rack"

Running x86 in z/VM has been a discussion for 25 years. Just fucking do it. Let people run whatever they want.

Just as people are excited about ARM for low-watt computing, make s390x just as exciting for people who want insane vertical resources but using the same dev tools that are used now for easy x86/ARM crossover.

But IBM culture has always been about overcharging a small and rich audience and now they are sitting around hocking their services cohosted thru AWS and everyone who has COBOL and 360ASM running are doing retirements with no plans to use the boxes after its all unloaded.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Just as people are excited about ARM for low-watt computing, make s390x just as exciting for people who want insane vertical resources but using the same dev tools that are used now for easy x86/ARM crossover.

The funny thing is that AIUI the technology is already basically there. They actually did throw the resources into getting a lot of Open Source software to be compatible with s390x, they've got Linux LPARs and LinuxONE. My understanding is that they just... don't make any effort to sell, outside a tiny fraction of Enterprise™.

[my123]

Performance per dollar and per watt of IBM machines are wholly out of step with the market. As such, there's no motivation to re-use those machines after migration off z/OS or other IBM solutions anyway...