Misteur-Z

* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers

* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS

On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !

Having done in the same day 6 hours of psycho-technical and psycho-motor tests at Air France to get into their "Pilote Cadet" program (4h in the morning then 2h in the afternoon after a lunch break), I definitely felt my mental speed during high load+stress at 32 was already a lot slower than at 20 in engineering school. I never felt so brain exhausted and I concluded I was not that sharp anymore ...

From what I understand, you still have to solve the usual hard challenges of HA:

1) Applications reconnecting to the new Postgres master and retrying queries

2) Persistent storage available in multiple AZs or regions for your Postgres pods (impossible on AWS for example)

2) you are invisible

From personal experience riding in the chaos that is Paris traffic for almost 10 years. I really scared myself maybe 3-4 times with bicycles running red lights at full speed.

=> Regular drivers are paying quite good attention because they need their car to go to work the next day, the real danger comes from newcomers and people who don't drive often (tourists, old people, families on weekends, etc.)

=> Anything that does not require a license (especially all these new stupid fast electric things that go over 20kmh) will make crazy tight turns without checking anything. They will get away with everything and never get stopped by the police, they don't have insurance and will not get fined for anything.

So I would add:

- Don't overspeed in traffic jams

- Don't ever come close to a bus or truck, moving or stopped (massive blind spots + not going to feel a thing running over you)

- Don't mess with car drivers (they will try to run over you and your 200kg bike)

- There will ALWAYS be a **** crazy biker with a death wish riding faster than you, whatever your speed is

You a need a shitload more RAM for sure and this also forgets about plugging a SAN, and any SAN from IBM is super expensive on hardware AND licenses.

IMO it's quite following the same trends as the stock market. Elon Musk makes statements on Twitter about how Bitcoin is an environmental disaster and rolls back on accepting Bitcoin in payments for Teslas. Bitcoin goes down.

There are a few Teslas with over 500,000 miles! They have a leader board but I can't find an up to date version.

https://twitter.com/TeslaMiles

https://insideevs.com/news/339110/highest-mileage-tesla-now-...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-record-mileage-900000-ki...

Why no one realizes developing software on MacOS/ARM and target Linux/x86 is a bad idea?

IBM mainframes virtual machines saying hello => "It is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/VM

Have you ever worked on an IT infrastructure where there is no comments in the source code, no documentation, no normalization, no specs? I am not talking about COBOL itself, I am talking about those COBOL jobs, it's only about fixing and/or maintaining. I hope no one is writing new things in COBOL.

Until some COBOL developer publishes his pay slip, I will stick to reality, top IT salaries are at tech giants.

From personal experience: BNP Paribas is one of the biggest bank in the world, top 5 if you exclude Chinese state owned ones, and they pay mainframe related jobs like shit.

Being young, smart and with a whole career ahead, you have no future working has a COBOL developer, no one should spend his life picking up shitty code left by his elders decades ago.

Disclaimer: lived in Paris for 20 years, specifically got my motorcycle license to avoid traffic jams and parking tickets 5 years ago.

Quick facts about Paris:

- there is motorcycles and scooters everywhere

- most people make trips way superior to 5km to go to work or even to go out

- no one can really afford parking his car outside of it's own neighborhood, because you don't have discounts then => 35 to 50€ a day!

You can buy an 125cc scooter with heated grips and a nice warm rain cover for around 3000-4000€ (new) / 1500€ (old) with a 200-300km range and you don't need to pay parking anywhere (yet).

IMO French automakers are lost and this car has almost market. They know they can't compete with Tesla in the near feature on real electric cars. It's way too expensive, for sure it's not targeted at 14-18yo in Paris "intra-muros". Its only features are you don't have to wear a helmet / protects you from rain. It has almost the size of a gas Smart ForTwo without the speed and range to go on a weekend trip.

Last time I worked on mainframes in 2012 the price to have a legacy banking app running with around 300 transactions/sec on IMS or DB2 was just insane.

IMO any "modern" architecture can handle the load. After all Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are not running on mainframes (just taking mastodon examples).

The main difference between ARM, x86 or Power vs Z is that you can keep your CPU usage between 95-100% in production and not break everything.

IBM missed the 21st century turn, and buying Red Hat will probably not save everything [1].

Mainframes are just too expensive, even with open-source software running from the Canonical or Red Hat ecosystem. You just can't keep billing CPU consumption and sell memory sticks like it's made of diamonds. Running heavy "modern" workloads will give you a crazy stupid high R4HA MSU bills ... the clash between the relatively cheap commodity hardware philosophy of the last 10 years and the IBM way of billing high-end things is too big.

I would say mainframes are still really good at handling an ultra large bus with sky-high bandwidth but that's pretty much it. The power platform is a lot cheaper and also good at that.

[1] Earlier this year: IBM’s Lost Decade https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22224782

Side-note: you don't need to completely severe a cable to lose signal, you just need to damage enough the fiber core inside. Although recent cables are a lot more flexible, bending or stretching will still do. Some electricians are still killing fiber optic cables these days installing/manipulating them like copper cables.

I only use CityMapper now in Paris

1) I don't want to feed the Google behemoth

2) It's very very accurate, even tells if you should get in the back/center/front to be closer to next commute/exit

3) They joke about strikes to brighten a bit those shitty days

https://citymapper.com

She's applying short sighted solutions for the declining 2 million of "rich" Parisians (aka her electors) in an area of 12 million. She's basically flipping the bird to more 80% of the population.

Lived in Paris for 20 years, everything is getting worse:

- Public transportation => many subway lines are saturated

- Traffic jams => stupid road and signals reworks (for cycling lanes mostly), it's a disaster, I am starting to think that about 90% of the population lives more than 5km from work and will never use a bicycle

- Security => cops have been in overtime for 5 years with Vigipirate & gilet jaunes and have no time for anything else

- Pollution => not a single cop around to enforce vehicles pollution laws, better hand parking tickets

Overall feels like a third world country where the state is losing control over everything.

Anyone younger and applying (scientifically) proven solutions could do.

source: http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-perd-encore-des-habi...

One day I have to take the time to write a blog post on how I started my engineering career at IBM working on mainframe at 21, then freaked out 6 years later in one of the biggest bank in the world where most of those older people where incompetent and judgemental. Everything was dinosaurs in constant politics and lies on both side, vendors and clients.

Worst IT practices and work ethics you could imagine. Lost source code, no comments/documentation, no tests, no monitoring, no benchmarks ... most of the work was done by people without a degree in anything and stayed around for decades. It's not well thought engineering.

I enjoyed working on mainframes, I still think it's amazing technology. Some of my colleagues where the nicest people I ever met, where very skilled and taught me a lot.

But I am now a DevOps working with open source, cloud computing & containerization, everything is nicer and a lot more interesting. And I don't have to fight everyone anymore because I am the one who will have to maintain the crap of retired people (most of the time I would hit a brick wall trying to explain what is IT in the 21st century).