Skip to Main Content
Accelerating Cloud Adoption
book

Accelerating Cloud Adoption

by Michael Kavis
November 2020
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
190 pages
5h 17m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Accelerating Cloud Adoption

Chapter 2. Technology

My first tech job out of college was working as a consultant writing code for a steel company in the south. The technology stack was rather simple back then. We had three generations of mainframes: Burroughs, DEC PDP-11/70, and the brand-new IBM 3090. We wrote in COBOL, Fortran, and Assembler. There were three options for storing data: tape, Db2, and IMS databases. The operating model was simple, too. A small group of people managed the mainframe, the software, and the databases, and the rest of us wrote code.

When an app broke, the person who wrote the code was paged and had to fix it. It was very common that there was one developer per program. This was long before the days of service-oriented architectures, microservices, and even the internet. Running an IT shop was much easier back then because there were fewer technologies to manage, the infrastructure was centrally managed, and almost everyone was writing code in the same languages.

A simplified operating model in my mainframe days looked like Figure 2-1. The mainframe team managed the full stack of the mainframe, which included the infrastructure, the programming languages (such as COBOL, Fortran, and RPG), and the database technologies (IMS, Db2, and so forth).

Simplified operating model during the mainframe era, circa 1980s
Figure 2-1. Simplified operating model during the mainframe era, circa 1980s

They also provided tape service, managed the execution of the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Is Your Company Ready for Cloud: Choosing the Best Cloud Adoption Strategy for Your Business

Is Your Company Ready for Cloud: Choosing the Best Cloud Adoption Strategy for Your Business

Pamela K. Isom, Kerrie Holley

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492055945Errata Page