Comment by mvdwoord

I would say these people were in a relationship with the mainframe, if that makes sense. And also having worked at IBM in the past where I sat adjacent to the mainframe support team for Business Services, I totally get it. Mainframes are awesome if you ask me, and in a sense we have been trying to reinvent a lot of its goodness with "commodity" x86 hardware.

From a technical-cultural perspective it was mostly sulkiness, and a complete and utter lack of embracing the paradigms of distributed computing. Also, like most internal clouds, there were plenty of issues as it was. Initially they just tried to replace mainframe application components 1:1 onto VMs in whatever way and whenever anything was <100% reliable they complained that our cloud was not able to do it. I had to explain in a very harsh way, under a lot of pressure (I believe not hitting the deadline of switching off the mainframes meant renewal for a year at 40 Mil.. or thereabouts) the realities of "cloud".

The developers I spoke with in that time though, were very much the opposite of the move fast breaking things crowd. Intelligent, but also narrow minded I would say.