IBM I cloud instances available

Neato!

With ezDev, developers will get access to the latest Power9 and Power10 systems, equipped with the latest IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 operating systems and development tools. These ezDev cloud partitions include modern IBM compilers as well as open source technologies that are increasingly used in IBM i shops. This will allow developers to access the latest development tools and have full systems control with QSECOFR authority. (It is important to be able to test applications for security vulnerabilities as they are being coded or refactored, and ezDev allows this to be done on a true developer system, not on a production environment and includes their custom ezSecurity SIP package to configure and manage system security.)

A little bit about the IBM i.

Despite all of the noise about security, apparently it's still terrible.

The overall lack of monitoring rates as one of Tatam's top three security annoyances, with 22 percent of the systems surveyed did not have an audit journal repository, and more than 50 percent of IBM i systems had no exit programs in place to monitor or control access to network services such as FTP, Telnet, and ODBC.

Oy. But it gets worse. IBM seems very interested in squeezing their customers, instead of giving them value.

A Power E850 is a four-node machine, so in theory it would support twice as many fan out features (48 card slots). That's where it might have impact in the midrange space where I live and work each day. So fret less about the lack of Power E850 support for IBM i, a religious battle, and more about how IBM is driving the cost of computing up for the P20 customer, a total cost of ownership battle.

I would love to develop software for the system, but since my price is zero and my license is GPL, that's hard to do.