The main difference is that I can kinda almost run the software on my laptop.
Until you use Cloud Spanner or SQS or any other cloud specific technology.
Until you use Cloud Spanner or SQS or any other cloud specific technology.
- Where with Mainframes, you had to be part of a medium corp / university to be able to touch one. With the Cloud, anyone worldwide with a laptop and 15$ in its wallet can learn how to use it.
That's a big difference and explain (partially) the exponential development of the Cloud.
Howevet in this world nothing is free. And we traded this accessibility for our confidentiality
- Where IBM had pretty low control on the usage of the hardware they were selling to you, Amazon now physically own both of your data and your software, and could technically know the color of the underwear of your CEO if they want to.
It's possible you see it this way because you've grown into your position before there was a cloud, or perhaps you had more free money to spend on things (pocket money or so on).
When I was younger, I was poor. The kind of poor I was (not starving, but no disposable income of any kind and certainly no personal money) is enough to kill the premise of learning a cloud provider dead.
What I mean is: if you need a credit card, it's probably not going to work. There's no way I could attach a credit card to something, there's no way I could spend $5/mo on learning, I didn't have $5 to my name, much less a credit card. And the risk of overspending even if you do have some spare income is fucking -scary- as a person who is poor. The idea that I could not have money for food because I forgot to delete something is stifling.
I learned nearly everything I know on 10 year old hardware that I picked up for free or near free. That is accessibility.
As it stands today I'm pretty flush with cash, but I -still- worry about unexpected cloud costs. Mostly because I work with it every day and know concretely how easy it is for the costs to balloon.
So, no, I think it's the same level of accessibility as mainframes, you can't work against an "old" cloud provider that you picked up for almost nothing. You have to put your money where your mouth is, and experimentation has a financial cost.
Only people who can help you foot the bill (university, employer) or who can clean down environments properly (tutorial labs) are going to make it even remotely more accessible, but it still wont be as accessible even then.
Accessibility of running things at home is why many of us are able to do this job, I think the majority of people my age spun up a PHP/MYSQL pairing and started messing with things, it was easy, and it was "free" if you already had a PC, and it could be exposed to the internet.. you learned a lot, incrementally.
This is the fundamental reason why certain tech prevails for so long.
I don't agree at all with this. You cannot simply buy an hold mainframe. And even if you did, transport costs alone would be higher than the cost of a free(!!!) cloud account. Plus you likely wouldn't have access to the required documentation.
You're basically comparing old PC hardware with cloud accessibility, which is something else entirely from mainframe computing (I can tell from first hand experience as I worked with mainframes for many years).
> Only people who can help you foot the bill (university, employer) or who can clean down environments properly (tutorial labs) are going to make it even remotely more accessible, but it still wont be as accessible even then.
WTH are you even talking about? You can limit the potential costs of cloud computing by sticking to the free offers (every major provider has them). I'd argue that if you can foot the bill for buying, transporting, and powering a used mainframe, you can easily afford a few bucks extra if you accidentally went over the free limit with a cloud service.
The only point I agree with you on is the credit card requirement. The rest is ramblings about a completely different topic - i.e. not related to mainframes at all.
I am equating the "accessibility" of cloud with the "accessibility" of mainframes in relation to PC hardware.
I do not refute the notion that mainframes are not accessible,
I am asserting the point that our lurch towards cloud hosted solutions with no on-prem replacement is the same lurch towards lack of accessibility that stifled the innovation and adoption of mainframes.
EDIT: also, Spanner and co often don't have free tiers, you're pretty limited in the amount of cloud services you can learn, and the danger of accidentally charging is inherent to the platform. The new budgeting features (which, are new btw) are good though, you have to be aware of them and know how to configure them though.
Unless your core business specifically targets the capabilities of chosen cloud specific tech, you can get away with developing on a supplemental solution and rely on CI plus staging environments to uncover and fix the edge cases that you miss this way.
This is especially true with low-level stuff like databases and queues. I've worked like this for years and never had to worry much about it.
Mainframes on the other hand are next to impossible to get in hardware and pretty much useless when emulated (what good is Hercules if you still can't get z/OS or VSE for it?).
Meaning, I can't run DynamoDB locally but PostgreSQL is close enough for most tasks, so sure I can kinda run that workload locally, but I won't learn any implementation-specific issues about how it would behave in AWS.
Similarly, I might have a hard time running DB2 for Z/OS, but I can also run it on Windows or Linux, and in this case I'm far closer to the actual development environment. Same is true for most of the dev tools and services commonly found in Z series environments.
I would argue the commenter above you is flat-out wrong: for most core AWS and Azure services, it's far easier to put together a home, single-desktop-PC-based dev environment for mainframe than it would be for cloud if you don't have the ability to actually use the cloud directly.
https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248205.html
(Edit: poorly phrased the first time around...)
(Yes, yes, leaving aside IBM z/OS licensing restrictions which preclude use under Hercules)
IBM doesn't exactly hand out VSE or z/OS licenses for peanuts...