Is Cloud the New Mainframe? (opens in new tab)

How can it possibly be more rent extracting than the mainframe?

Also openness, choice of vendor, invisible hardware and virtually unlimited scalability are different.

Cloud was actually the answer to "how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins."

The rest is noise.

Startups aside, most enterprise teams match the following: apps don't need to scale massively (scale up is enough and a surprising number of large, well-knwon services are entirely based on scale-up architectures behind the facade), most don't need dynamic scale, and most aren't even going to be started and stopped dynamically.

But hiring people who can run a network, only to have them sit idle most of the time or - and this is common - doing things and as a result breaking things, and people who can run servers and VMware and so on, and firewall, and WAN connectivity, ...

A lot of these things are, in fact, trivial, but vendors made them stupid and hard and painful to set up and doubly painful to troubleshoot. Cloud exploited that situation.

Things aren't a _lot_ better now but they're somewhat better, and now the economics of cloud are starting to get looked at.

> Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough.

Not quite, the cloud forced you to figure out how to scale, do reliability and all the hard parts, mainly because AWS didn't offer any features like zero downtime VM transfers or any kind of pracitcal storage migration.

The point of the mainframe is that its almost like a really fucking huge lambda function host. You sling your app on the mainframe, ask for resources and let it run. If you run out of capacity, buy another mainframe and link it to the old one. Need a new region/reliability zone? pay a license, install a fat network link and jobs a goodun.

There are videos of where HP/IBM literally blows up a mainframe to prove its auto failover skills.

THe cloud is a poor proxy of what a mainframe _could_ do at its best. But its a reasonable facsimile of what a main frame did at it's worst.

The answer is the classic desktop model, local first than "connected" (these days we would use more the synced term instead). Meaning some do NOT want people own their digital infra and know the power it give for business reasons, meaning big money. While most to not even know what they can do with their own "endpoints" or modern dumb terminals that actually do have much more power than old dumb terminals and they cost much as well.

The answer is "hey users did you know that you can have GMail on your iron? All you need is to pull messages from a server to your local maildirs and run a local indexer with the relevant UI. If you do that perhaps with a personal domain you can change the provider or be yourself the provider without change NOTHING nor the UI nor the addresses/aliases. YOU WON YOUR DAMN DATA". Or as well "hey, did you know you can damn work with some files locally than have them auto-sync-ed back to the server? It's easy. And so on.

The answer is that we need damn desktops also in hw, meaning not using craptops as desktop replacer no matter if docked with a decent screen(s) and input devices or masochistically used directly on their small bad keyboards and small screens. We need the concept of home-office and tools to be on-the-go ONLY when we need them, we need the concept of a damn homeserver per home, to host personal services in an IPv6 internet with a static global per device (allowing privacy extensions, but still knowing a static address if needed) and so on.

Unfortunately most people do not care until they discover they are trapped and that's too late because they use walled gardens and there is not much modern sw to work in the classic way while few profit from the most and to their best to avoid such knowledge.

> can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer

That door has been closed to chips built on CMOS for a long time. It's why we started scaling horizontally in our chips by adding more parallel cores.

> to render Cloud unnecessary?

The advantage with cloud is, the machines can die, and I'm not severely impacted. A new lambda machine will spool up, will be sent my function, will receive a copy of the asynchronous event to start working again.

This, personally, is why I love the cloud. I no longer have to worry about the mapping of code to the hardware that will run it. I pay up front for designing my code around the architecture, but I win every time it runs in that I have essentially zero maintenance overhead associated with it.

Scalability from cloud providers masks inefficient code. In my opinion there are a lot of applications that can significantly reduce resource utilization if enough attention and care is given by the developers.

Perhaps obvious for you and I (and some others too), but not for everyone...Because i'll make the assumption that you and I (and some others too) are living in the future. But, like the saying goes: the future is already here, its merely unequally distributed...Or something like that. ;-)

Yes, but perhaps not to the enterprise buyer.

I mean... the very first few sentences of the Multics paper intro say it:

> One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility.

It's not just a matter of reliability: mainframes allow tighter coupling between different parts of your application, thus faster performance, since everything is (or can be) essentially on the same hardware that is optimized for data processing. Cloud services are getting closer to bridging the gap, but for some applications mainframes will still be the only way to go. One main advantage that cloud has is you can distribute things into services that can be hosted anywhere: the same cloud service, a different cloud service, etc. Yes, you can do that with mainframes, too, but in the past mainframe software wasn't written with that flexibility. Today, everything is all about distributed microservices.

As to the article's premise that people are getting locked into cloud services as they used to get locked into mainframe services, you could make the same argument about any tech: write your app with language X, and you'll have a hard time translating it to language Y. Write a low-level app that runs on Intel chips and you'll have a hard time porting it to Motorola. That's the nature of software development.

My biggest personal gripe with developer culture is how utterly historically ignorant it is.

There's a general recency bias in the field where computing knowledge works like a social media feed. New ideas and new projects are at the top, and old stuff just falls off the bottom regardless of merit. Then someone re-invents it, often claiming credit (not deliberately dishonestly because they are ignorant), and then it runs its life cycle and scrolls off the bottom. Repeat, forever.

There are a small number of things like very popular languages and OSes that have staying power but the rest of the ecosystem is fads and churn.

There is some progress under the churn, but the actual progress is almost in spite of the fashion chasing. The churn just forces us to do a ton of extra busy-work re-implementing the universe constantly and chasing fads to remain compatible.

FYI, "premise" is a foundational idea or statement, so in this case you want to use "on premises" or "on prem".

The premise of my response is that you'd find value in knowing the difference and will take it in the positive spirit in which it's intended.