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
It’s a computer with:
* High redundancy
* High stability
* High Throughput
* Ability to hotswap any component (ie, change any component while the computer is still running).
Typically any server or other information processing unit with 99%+ uptime requirements use mainframe architecture.
P.S: Ok. Maybe not every high-uptime server these days. There have been a whole load of innovations for distributed computers which makes it easy to just…use more machines. But they used to.
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