1. Old software
2. Large not-tech companies who outsource their IT department.
Do any modern tech companies actually migrate to mainframes?
However applications would likely be science, engineering and finance.
All you have to do is go to a vendors page and check out the flagship customers.
There was a great article a few years back talking about how mainframes and the cloud were similar architectures with a focus on the challenges of multi-tenancy and focused on the fact that the cloud companies were hiring some people who had helped develop mainframes. For the life of me, I can't find it now (all my searches just bring up articles about migrating mainframes to the cloud).
Some of the main differences is that mainframes had an integrated coding environment (and usually no dev/staging/prod separation). Probably more important is that mainframes are usually built to be highly reliable (hardware failures are rare), whereas most cloud providers are using commodity servers that are meant to fail often (If you're using AWS at any sort of scale, you've probably seen a server go down because of a hardware failure). With mainframes you're typically paying the cost upfront (CapEx) and amortizing the cost over time (with mainframes being expected to last 10+ years?) vs the OpEx cost of the cloud.
Pricing models don’t necessarily rely on the underlying technology, IMO. (Consider the ol’ paid-for vs vendor-bundled browsers.)
I’m not sure whether reliability makes for different categories either: different OSes have different focus on reliability, but are all OSes, after all. Definitely makes for different use-cases, though!
I also wonder whether the integrated coding environment and staging aspect primarily reflects general developments in coding workflow. That is, whether they are an incidental or intrinsic difference. It would probably have been much easier to make up my mind on that if I had any mainframe experience.
Categorization depends on how you draw the lines, and I definitely have a bias towards assuming hyped-up stuff is probably less interesting or new than the hype makes it out to be. Though, I haven’t made up my mind whether to consider mainframes and ‘the cloud’ different instances of the same thing.
Thanks for the reply, interesting stuff!
