The Mainframe Is a Modern Platform
No, it&#x27;s not. A mainframe is awesome for certain classes of problems, but I don&#x27;t generally think of those classes as modern. Yes, you <i>can</i> run ML on a mainframe, but its performance isn&#x27;t going to scale as broadly as throwing a thousand ephemeral virtual hosts at the problem (why virtual? because I&#x27;m not running ML 24&#x2F;7 and don&#x27;t want to pay for the cluster while everyone is at home asleep). Sure, maybe it can handle 12 million web requests per second - I&#x27;m skeptical about the complexity of those requests but let&#x27;s roll with it - but now the computing resource is more robust than the network connections you have plugged into it. Are the pipes into your data center truly more reliable than a multi-AZ, multi-region AWS deployment?<p>To put it bluntly, mainframes are wonderful solutions to problems that I don&#x27;t personally find interesting. (Note: personally. It&#x27;s not like I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a legitimate need for the financial systems that mainframes power, it&#x27;s just that I&#x27;m glad I&#x27;m not the one who has to run them.) The problems I enjoy involve horizontal scaling at levels that a mainframe just isn&#x27;t going to reach, and those are the kinds of problems that most people would describe as &quot;modern&quot;. And as I don&#x27;t think mainframes are a good solution to what I consider to be modern problems, neither do I consider them to be a modern platform.<p>Again, not that this makes them less valuable for the problems they <i>do</i> solve. I don&#x27;t want to run a stock exchange with its gazillion transactions (as in the database <i>and</i> financial kind) per second on a cluster of x86 VMs.<p>Edit: But you want to make them modern, make it easier to play with the damn things. I can get almost any other kind of computing tech into my house for under $1,000, but it&#x27;s freaking impossible to experiment on a mainframe without selling a kidney or signing a contract in blood. If your platform&#x27;s &quot;learn more&quot; link goes to a form read by a salesperson, you&#x27;ve already lost me. If I have to pull out a credit card to tinker with it, you&#x27;ve already lost me. Contrast with AWS, for example, which practically throws free resources at you to get you interested and invested in the platform. Where are my free IBM resources that get me a mainframe login and access to developer-useful documentation? As it stands today, if I want to learn how to operate Big Iron, I pretty much have to take a job doing it full-time. Make it easy for me to poke at one at night and on weekends if you want me to tell my boss about this cool thing you&#x27;re trying to sell.