Can you expand on why they are joy to work with?
- No devops, you have real sysadmins whose priority is security and system administration, not development.
- Not relearning to invent the wheel every six months. The technology changes incrementally. If you get out of the field for a few years, read the "what's new" sections of the new manuals to catch up.
- Documentation. IBM docs are great, remind me of NASA docs. They have everything you need, you can go days without googling a problem.
- Backwards compatibility. Decades old sources can be compiled, decades old binaries can be run. Architecture changes are handled transparently.
- Simplicity. The interfaces might seem primitive compared to PC OSs, but there's also less complexity, and less attack surface.
- Uptime. Almost everything, including CPUs, is hot-swappable. This doesn't add to the joy, but it's remarkable.
I think it's things like these which makes me thing AWS will remain the top cloud provider for the next few decades.
Azure policies are comparatively a breeze, making it the smart and increasingly obvious choice for any regulated (read: large) corporation.
IBM is a dinosaur company that exists because of embedded connections in government, banking, and defense. They charge 100x the going rate for ancient tech that’s insecure and an absolute nightmare to develop for.
The sooner everyone drops anything associated with IBM or Oracle, the better for everyone. Absolute cancers.
If the only alternative is "AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Spark, Aurora, etc…" I might have to think long and hard about it...