[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On 16 Nov 2023 13:36:17 -0000
kludge at panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

> 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.

	Yes you can but ...

> 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.

	Back in 1990 I was involved in designing a system that could not
have been run on the mainframes of the day because they had insufficient IO
bandwidth but a distributed solution spread across twenty high end 88K
machines did.

> >	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.

	Yes but instead of trying to secure each one individually you write
rules which are used by the deployment engine (kubernetes usually).

	A single instance implemented on virtual hardware is certainly
slower than the same thing implemented on bare metal - the win comes from
having a scalable design. The artful part is making the design scalable and
not putting bottlenecks in it. If the single instance is 1/10th the speed
of bare metal but you can run a thousand instances in parallel then you
have 100 times the speed of bare metal.

> >	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.

	Yes it is - that's why my data lives at home. I don't need scalable
solutions thankfully. Those who do and care a lot run their own.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency