What even is a mainframe? I’ve been involved in software and infrastructure for 20+ years, I understand data centres, servers, services, microservices, databases, HA/SPOF, clusters and all the cloud equivalents, but never came across a mainframe. It’s almost a legend – are mainframes a real thing? What do/did they do? What’s happening to them? Where are they?
In: Engineering
Mainframes are basically servers that prioritise high availability over anything else. They support hot-swapping components without having to shut down the system. Mainframes also prioritise throughput over raw compute performance, so they are often used to handle things like batch runs, transactions and the like.
A good overview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouAG4vXFORc&t=1228s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouAG4vXFORc&t=1228s)
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