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
Before the cloud, which is millions of small servers running distributed applications, there were large multi-CPU systems that were essentially one platform running all storage/compute with multiuser access. These were mainframes.
It’s nice to note that these were often used as compute bureau services for corporates to run their applications because it was too expensive for every company to have their own mainframe. AWS and other cloud provider are just reinventions of these kinds of services. This is where ideas like virtualisation, multiuser access, and networking came from.
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