How do containers in the cloud differ from containers on the mainframe? How difficult is it to provision a new z/VM virtual machine with contemporary software? ow much is just different coverage in the in-flight magazines versus substantive benefits of the cloud?
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Phil Smith III <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2024 7:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Banks migrate from mainframes to AI-driven cloud tech Bob Bridges wrote: >"...where mainframes' resilience meets the agility of cloud computing." >What is the "agility" of the cloud, exactly? The ability to spin up more instances [of applications that are built that way, obviously] on demand/automatically. For certain very peaky workloads this is a huge win. Not that I'm in any way arguing that these are important applications in the real world, but things like Pinterest and Instagram at least started this way in AWS or GCP, still use the model (albeit presumably on their own cloud now): when something big happens and usage blows up, instead of just getting dog-slow or crashing, more instances get spun up and things hum along. Yes, there are a ton of assumptions involved there-capacity/competence/security/etc. of the cloud provider. I'm very chary of public cloud for "real work" for this reason. But if you look at it at the right angle (perhaps squinting a lot!), you can see that-again, for the right workloads-it gets you out of the business of provisioning/capacity management/etc. Of course it also encourages inefficient code, but ?maybe? that's OK (again, in the right use cases). One of the biggest problems, of course, is that folks don't understand the caveats, go in with both feet first, and get burned. All of the CSPs, for example, offer some sort of cryptographic service. None of them are BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)-in other words, you're trusting the service itself not to attack you or to get compromised and allow an attack. WCGW? For software vendors, the attraction is that they don't have to build/manage as much of the platform as they do when they provide a fully functional server. All that really does is move that requirement from the vendor (once) to each customer, so it's a win for the vendor and a loss for the customer. That is, the customer has to do all the vulnerability scanning, patching, etc., instead of having the vendor do the heavy lifting (the wise customer does the scanning anyway, but then expects the vendor to provide the updates.) I keep waiting for the customer world to figure this out; hasn't happened yet AFAICT. Weird. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
