Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

It&#x27;s a haphazard half-baked re-implementation of a lot of mainframe ideas with an extra helping of YAML and more rent extraction schemes. Plus it lets a whole generation think they invented these things (virtualization, containers, orchestration, containerized deployment, dynamic block storage, ingress&#x2F;egress controllers, terminal aggregators, ...).<p>Now that people are getting sick of cloud I&#x27;m sure we are going to re-invent personal computing now with entirely new terminology and re-implementation of all the original ideas. Just please no YAML.

IBM Mainframe was an answer when computers couldn&#x27;t vertical scale fast enough. Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn&#x27;t horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. So, the real question is: can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer or on a set of computers with low enough cost to render Cloud unnecessary?

The article implies that Cloud is bad in the same way that Mainframe was bad. But I think we need to distinguish between the technology (HTTP-based, public internet services) and the business model (subscription-based SaaS). The latter may be bad in some cases, but the technology is here to stay. No one is going back to proprietary client-server systems.<p>In fact, I think we can learn from the Mainframe. Mainframes had a much more cohesive and unified platform. I wish we could write a unified program (not a decoupled frontend&#x2F;backend) and have it run on an abstract, scalable substrate (which happens to be implemented on a distributed system).<p>Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this a while back:<p>Rise of the Hyperplatforms: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridwhale.medium.com&#x2F;rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a148e608de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridwhale.medium.com&#x2F;rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a1...</a><p>GridWhale and a Brief History of Computing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridwhale.medium.com&#x2F;gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-of-computing-be24e5263328" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridwhale.medium.com&#x2F;gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-o...</a>

In many cases its the new mainframe, but with more opaque, and as a consequence more fragile, abstractions

Hasn&#x27;t this been obvious for a decade or more?

No, mainframe had almost exclusively dumb clients, at most some local display trickery but cloud is way, way more distributed. I think the main point is valid though: distribution of SW is now much easier, the stacks of floppies of my youth are luckily a faint memory.

Cloud is the new mainframe, Kubernetes is the new job manager, microservices are the new COBOL.

If you are running serverless stuff then kinda.<p>in terms of expense, then also maybe, but the point of a mainframe is that you got scaling and reliability as part of the cost, without having to think about it too much. The cloud puts most of the responsibility on you. you still can&#x27;t live migrate processes from VM host to another VM host in AWS.

For all the redundancies that exist, &quot;cloud&quot; isn&#x27;t reliable and therefore can&#x27;t replace the mainframe. Then again, most things don&#x27;t need mainframe level reliability, which is why Microsoft Teams (and other Microsoft services) is problematic today.

Calling cloud computing &quot;the new mainframe&quot; is a bit of an understatement. One of the design goals of Multics was to establish computation as a sort of public utility, just like water or sewer or electric services; cloud providers seem to be filling that exact role, and I feel like it&#x27;s only a matter of time before municipalities start establishing their own local cloud providers as public utilities.

Give it a bit of time, and mainframe become the new cloud, but only after a cycle of &quot;everything on site[1]&quot;. This is not an industry that learns from the past when scrap can be acquired by relentless fashion grifting.<p>[1] Edited as I discovered that premises is not simply plural of premise [2]<p>[2] English is not my first language

There is an interesting dichotomy I dont understand. We&#x27;ve seen the push to cloud saas, but a push to shrink llms to run on device.<p>Why?

centralization&#x2F;decentralization pendulum