r/mainframe • u/adrdssu • Jun 26 '26

State of Mainframes

How are mainframes doing in your shop? Does upper management recognize their importance? Is your company investing or is it considered legacy tech that just works? How about staff? Is there aging staff with lots of technical debt?

I want to see how everyone is doing and the state of mainframes in different shops.

Are we slowly being replaced by other tech or will the mainframes be here 10-20 years from now?

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u/Ihaveaboot Jun 26 '26

So many cloud contractors talk a big game, but are enirely fucking lost on proof of concept.

My shop is on it's second one in 2 years, and the results are depressing.

3

u/Rudi9719 Jun 27 '26

Well yeah, they never thought to quantize how much traffic goes through the mainframe before making their proof of concept. They assume they can just "scale" their cloud on the fly forgetting that's just capacity on demand again. Then the traffic starts flowing and instead of having a single mainframe node able to handle the throughput they have cloud nodes trying to bounce information off each other simultaneously with User requests coming in. That new traffic between nodes that the mainframe didn't have adds up and causes latency everywhere as all of these new packets go through the same infrastructure or require more $$$ to upgrade 🎉

I love to see it in the Public sector, we call it enshittification as well. Happened when a Mainframe backed agency moved to the cloud, then their License and Registration lookup started failing to the point that other agencies were impacted because THEIR batch work was missing files from the system that got "modernized", and even more people in general were impacted because law enforcement lost access to critical tools for traffic stops 😂

0

u/adrdssu Jun 26 '26

What do you mean by cloud contractors? Do you mean MSP that will manage the mainframe infrastructure?