The cloud is coming for your mainframes [Video]

Moore’s Law—you know, the number of transistors in a chip doubles about every two years while the costs are cut in half—seems to have forgotten the mainframe. In the world of mainframes, computing keeps getting more and more expensive, largely because customers haven’t had any other option. Until now.

After years of largely ignoring mainframe applications, cloud is starting to encroach on that last bastion of vendor lock-in. FedEx has announced that by 2024 it will shutter its data centers and the mainframes that go with them to go “all in” on cloud (likely Microsoft Azure, if past purchasing habits continue). In addition to benefits like increased agility, FedEx expects to save $400 million.

More companies will get serious about this sort of decision, which means the cloud vendors also need to get serious about helping move mainframe workloads. What will it really take to convince IT decision-makers? In a very real way, …