I think you can get Power systems on the cloud here
https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual...
Unfortunately completing this flow - with the goal to get a temporary shell on a Power system running some Linux distro - requires me to authorize a payment of over 1300 dollars before I even select an image. That's for "reserving" 1 POWER core and 2GB of RAM... As an individual developer playing with this, that's way over my head. I'd understand very high end cloud pricing for that (tens of dollars per hour, I'd be happy to pay that for messing around a little), but this isn't even a cloud machine pricing model. For reference, $1300 is over half the price of getting a Talos motherboard with an 8-core POWER9 CPU you then actually own.
It seems IBM does not have the infrastructure or volume to permit cloud pricing here. I understand they might not have this, but in my opinion they need to work on this to make it accessible.
If you don’t reward good ideas (they don’t even need to be particularly good or novel, just common sense), you’ll have a company trying to grow something that’s reached its peak usage with motivational speeches, very inspiring leaders and good old pressure on employees as a form of local optimization.
I just don't think most companies run this way, maybe it's the military way of thinking of strict hierarchy rather than a market where the best ideas can develop or where you can at least break out of the hierarchy to get something started.
The MBAs and bean counters would probably argue that it's important to get certain unpopular things done, but I think a market would solve that too, as soon as something becomes a bottle neck, someone would step in.
My impression is that organizations are far too centered around VPs and directors who get to carry on without having to prove themselves again in the new situations they're in.
They care about the quarterly report and right now the best way to improve short-term performance is to milk your existing locked-in customers for as much money as possible.
That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect.
If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.
They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well.
And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.
I know some of the IBM story from very close and it takes a certain attitude to even want to work there.
If IBM had even just kept pace and stayed behind AWS with Softlayer after they acquired them, they would have a healthy cloud business by now. It might be because I maintained a system on Softlayer both pre and post acquisition - so I was really close and able to see what was happening - but they squandered a huge opportunity there.
edit: oh hey, you're ahead of me :D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185759
Well besides the fact that 1) IBM is the only party with both the capabilities and interest in making high performance Power based products [1], and 2) evidently does not understand how to (or why to) invest in bringing this to a general audience. I don't really care if they would do this in IBM Cloud or with other cloud infrastructure companies, but they don't seem to be doing either. In addition 3) why would other parties be interested in running Power when they can run amd64 or arm? It certainly doesn't look to have a price advantage...
IBM really needs to shepherd Power well - they're the only ones that can do it. But I can't help but thinking they seem to be leading it to the grave despite apparently very capable engineering.
[1]: And why would anyone but IBM go for Power at this point if they can have ARM too? An open license matters very little when compared to ARM's mindshare and momentum.
Which is a huge shame, the POWER ISA per se is mostly fine, and their commitment to open firmware etc. for trustworthy computing (see Raptor) is a niche that for some reason interests nobody else.
If they want to turn it around and compete with x86, ARM and maybe even RISC-V on the low end, they need to commit to openpower. Get some interesting cores open sourced under the openpower umbrella, docs, open source bus interfaces for connecting stuff on a SOC, etc. And get some decent priced hardware into the hands of hobbyists and as dev boards for embedded.
Besides that, some of the atrocities that I've seen IBM and their partners commit are a good warning that you want to stay far away from them. Lest you be Watsonized and made dependent on marketing-masquerading-as-technology.
https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/
Each of these do some filtering because they give out resources only to find people bitcoin mining. Also, a good number of experimenters give up on the first obstacle they encounter or aren't really well-versed in benchmarking / architectural differences (lots of folks running microbenchmarks). There are some incredible resources available (many free) for those looking for a partner and not just a box. Good luck in finding the right partner for your projects.
OTOH, getting into the developer program requires talking to their sales/marketing droids too. But, if your a software OEM or have a SAS product, they were (are?) hungry and actively doing their best to recruit companies to their platforms. So, you spend a couple hours answering their questions, and in return you get some pretty steep hardware/software discounts and they will loan you machines.