Despite my 15 years of experience in the Linux infrastructure space, if you had asked me a year ago what a mainframe was, I’d be hard-pressed to give a satisfying technical answer. I was surprised to learn that the entire time I’d been toiling away on x86 machines in various systems administration roles, Linux was running on the s390x architecture for mainframes. In fact, 2019 marks 20 years of IBM’s involvement in Linux on the mainframe, with purely community efforts predating that by a year.
