The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives
The reason mainframe persists is it&#x27;s a pretty slick development and deployment environment. A lot things you might cobble together as dependencies - like maybe a database or a message queue, or observability facilities or even deployment strategies like hot-hot deployments - they&#x27;re all just built in to the platform. That means they&#x27;re trivial to consume and they&#x27;re fully supported by one vendor. It&#x27;s like the worlds most comprehensive application development framework.<p>Going back to the hardware that everyone likes to focus on, it&#x27;s less radically different from normal servers today than it was historically. The mainframe today is a 19 inch rack like any other. By that i mean it is not only a 19 inch rack like your x64&#x2F;ARM servers are but also the same power density (32 or 64 amp racks), cooling requirements etc.<p>The most interesting bit is the software, not the hardware. There are cool hardware aspects too - but focus on them and you miss the real reason these things are popular in certain environments.