j...@crossno.us (John Crossno) writes: > Just in... > http://www.computerworld.com/article/3185530/government-it/trump-s-son-in-law-jared-kushner-prepares-for-cobol-cloud-mainframes.html
O'Malley showed Chaffetz the developers at work. "They see a working environment that looks exactly like Amazon (Web Services) and we're doing it in the mainframe," he said. "If you have code that works and works well, that is like gold -- you do not want to throw that away." .... But the challenge with older Cobol system systems is that many were not designed to be extensible and everything that needs to be done has to be rely on custom code, said McCarthy. ... snip ... re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2017c.html#96 ComputerWorld Says: Cobol plays major role in U.S. government breaches note that large part of cloud environment is "on-demand" ... each cloud megadatacenter with hundreds of thousands of systems, large percentage sitting idle waiting for instant-on to handle "on-demand" requirements. Dataprocessing system & software prices have dropped so dramatically that major expense for cloud megadatacenters are increasingly power & environmentals. Side-effect is that major vendors are doing custom chips for cloud megadatacentors meeting the instant-on and optimized power&cooling requirements (cloud megadatacenters repreasent over half server chip business). ever since the rise of "killer micros" from when IBM went into the red in the early 90s (and was being reorged into the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breaking up the company) ... majority have migrated off, but there have been a number of failed (mainframe) "modernization" efforts ... particularly in financial and government (including treasury/irs). last decade with huge uptic in gov.outsourcing and the rapidly spreading "success of failure" culture ... where beltway bandits clear lot more profit from series of failures http://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2007/04/the-success-of-failure/24107/ 70% of the intelligence budget and over half the people (trivia, former CEO of IBM headed up this private-equity owner of beltway bandit & employer of Snowden) http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us to address some of the opportunities, there has been a lot of "middle layer"/middleware ... leave legacy stuff relatively untouched ... and write new intermediate applications to translate between whatever new is needed and whatever the legacy cobol implements. I did review of beltway bandit large, new 3yr gov. contract. I spent all day explaining how it wasn't going to work and what was needed to make it work. They spent all day saying that they would be doing exactly what the contract called for. At the end of the day, somebody explained (when everbody else had left) that when the existing contract ran out, they might consider getting it rewritting to something that would work. Their constant refrain was "leave no money on the table" (renegotiating existing contract to something that would work, met less revenue). Last decade, I estimated development of a few government web pages with full regression testing and security at $30k, a beltway bandit won the development contract for $10M ... 33333% markup ... right out of the military-industrial complex. disclaimer: I use to sponsor Boyd's briefings at IBM, one of Boyd acolytes wrote this account https://www.amazon.com/Pentagon-Wars-Reformers-Challenge-Guard-ebook/dp/B00HXY969W/ which HBO made into movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars data breach posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#data.breach.notification success of failure posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#success.of.failure -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
