[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Scott Dorsey]

Ahem A Rivet's Shot  <steveo at eircom.net> wrote:
>
>	Yes they are popular with banks and the like because they *also*
>run their old OS-360 stuff without recompiling it, but to anyone who
>doesn't need that they are very expensive for little gain. Guess what many
>of their customers run in the RHEL environments - yep kubernetes and docker.

The IBM systems are I/O machines.  The CPU is just sitting there telling the
I/O controllers what to do and most of the real work is being done by other
hardware outside the CPU.  So you can have incredibly high workloads and 
huge transation rates with relatively slow CPUs.

This was a huge win as late as a decade ago, but these days it's not that 
much of a win unless you have a write-mostly database that is inefficient 
to distribute.  Because CPU has become so damn cheap that we just throw
CPU at problems now.

>>    Decentralized usually = SLOW ... and INSECURE ... despite
>>    claims.
>
>	Tell that to Amazon, Google etc. look into the architecture of
>Amazon Dynamo and marvel at the way it scales and handles machine failures
>and network outages. Mainframes are great up to a point, right up until you
>can't get one big enough and then you *need* a scalable solution.
>kubernetes is an easy way to get one.

This is true, but Amazon and Google -are- still slow and insecure in ways
that I don't think is apparently obvious.  Instead of keeping one thing
secure, you have thousands upon thousands to keep secure.

>	SAAS is huge in the large corporate world, it all runs on
>virtual machines and docker containers orchestrated by kubernetes. It's
>only insecure if you don't know how to secure it, the most security
>sensitive run it all in their own datacentres on hypervisors that they
>control. The rest trust the contractual obligations of the companies that
>run the data centres (Microsoft, Google and Amazon mostly).

This is where the scary part is, yes.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."