Here's the thing: A mainframe may have spare capacity, but you still have to call IBM to unlock it. In order to make a Z run in a cost-effective manner, you need to run at 90%+ utilization at all times - which is excellent for batch jobs that can be scheduled, but is difficult to achieve with on-demand loads.
You're paying based on compute available, not just compute used (unless I'm misremembering our contracts back in the day). Sure, the amount of available capacity can be changed, but a phone call to big blue is not automated. Cloud autoscaling is.
You're right that IBM mainframes are far more modern and cost effective than we assume. Sadly, they are still behind the curve of cloud hosting.
Respectfully, the hell you say. Cloud 'autoscaling' is something that has to be tenderly maintained by software engineers, who expect to be paid salaries and benefits and so on. It's not like FedEx can just rsync their data into the cloud and have all their software run forever. Instead, they need the engineering team that manages their existing data workflows, and now they also need cloud engineers to translate that into something that won't bankrupt the company, since they're moving from the mainframe world (where you keep your system loaded to an efficient price point) to the cloud world (where you are billed by the second).
Moving your compute spend from capex to opex is a perfectly valid move, but pretending the reason is that someone has to make a phone call once in a while is kind of bizarre, when the alternative is having to hire a whole new cadre of techincal talent.
I agree the occasional phone call removed from your workflow isn't reason enough to justify a giant cloud migration... but it is one of many reasons.
Ever work for a company with their own datacenters that were NOT cutting edge? The work to provision resources can be so painful that it severely inhibits prototyping. Being able to spin up resources in seconds with some API calls is very valuable.
It's probably this. I've spent time trying to advocate for the benefits of these systems, but its like shooting a super soaker into the sun.
I get my pick of a billion different hardware vendors, they’re all interchangeable and interoperable, every problem I can possibly dream up has been solved a hundred times before. The skills are commonplace and transferable so hiring doesn’t mean convincing some poor desperate grad to get trained in the company script, hires will actually want the skills, and you can find senior people.
A good example of where these systems come into their own is payment/ACH/wire processing. The consequences of these networks going down are so severe that it is worth it to construct an entire facility with the computer systems and business in mind from the very beginning.
Today, mainframes are more for the type of business that are finding the need to pour the literal foundations for their own datacenters. If you are even considering cloud as a viable path, then this kind of stuff is certainly not for you.
You're paying a premium for both the hardware and the lack of develops knowing EBSIDIC, JCL, Cobol, etc..
Actually, from what I remember of Oracle, that might be very similar. I remember having to pay license fees per core.
Mainframes are still king when it comes to transaction processing but having such a closed off ecosystem has screwed them.
Even FPGA's are more accessible to learn. On AWS you can spin up eg; an F1 instance and get a dev environment.
The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it.
The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs.
I can understand if you're locked into COBOL with EBCDIC and can't find talent, but Z runs freaking Ubuntu now! I know IBM works furiously on modern ecosystem support.
Not shill for IBM, but what exactly is it that they're expecting to be so different from their cloud migrations? Or is everyone here caught up in the "Mainframe old" falsehood.