So You Wanna Go On-Prem
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So You Wanna Go On-Prem
1–10 of 105 posts
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#2yes Yes YES! One thousand times yes! I previously worked at a SaaS mobile device management company (apperian) that took the on-prem plunge to score big enterprise / government contracts. The ops / support team quadrupled and there were so many headaches. This article nailed it.
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#3yes Yes YES! One thousand times yes! I previously worked at a SaaS mobile device management company (apperian) that took the on-prem plunge to score big enterprise / government contracts. The ops / support team quadrupled and there were so many headaches. This article nailed it.
Oh god yes.
Just wait until you're attempting to support a distributed ML system through some fucking idiot sysadmin (well, "sysadmin") who god only knows how he still has a job, but HE CANNOT RELIABLY USE SSH. Because of their security requirements (ie no internets for you, including package servers), getting updated packages onto their 4 year old redhat installs were a nightmare. And they wanted to run very high cpu requirement distributed solvers inside 4gb single processor vms. The fun was just endless.
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#4For those who haven't come across it before and have already dockerized there is a nice solution for some of these issues from replicated (http://www.replicated.com).
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#5Having done On-Prem in a past life, this article nails it on the head. It's a difficult problem to solve and the support costs are very real. You need a team (or teams) dedicated to OP if you're going to do it right. It can be lucrative and a huge differentiator for your product, but it is far from easy.
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#6One thing I would call out: don't do CI to these people. Eat the pain and cut honest-to-goodness versions. Ideally, cut them on the quarter, so that your customers can comfortably expect a New Version to be available at a specific time.
I used to be on the other side of this desk, so.... trust me. It makes it easier when we can all refer to a specific version. You can throw us specific patches or whatever. From the developer standpoint, you're not delivering a continuously delivered system, you're delivering a "server app" of a specific version.
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#7One thing I would call out: don't do CI to these people. Eat the pain and cut honest-to-goodness versions. Ideally, cut them on the quarter, so that your customers can comfortably expect a New Version to be available at a specific time. I used to be on the other side of this desk, so.... trust me. It makes it easier when we can all refer to a specific version. You can throw us specific patches or whatever. From the d…
From experience, on-prem customers won't accept continuous updates anyway. They have multi-month change freezes.
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#8One thing I would call out: don't do CI to these people. Eat the pain and cut honest-to-goodness versions. Ideally, cut them on the quarter, so that your customers can comfortably expect a New Version to be available at a specific time. I used to be on the other side of this desk, so.... trust me. It makes it easier when we can all refer to a specific version. You can throw us specific patches or whatever. From the d…
From experience, on-prem customers won't accept continuous updates anyway. They have multi-month change freezes.
Sometimes more - if your product is used in an internal app that has a 6+ month release cycle, they'll be updated in sync (if they're updated at all)
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#9For those who haven't come across it before and have already dockerized there is a nice solution for some of these issues from replicated ( http://www.replicated.com ).
We use Replicated, and it was insanely easy to set up. We had an on-prem version ready to go in a few days. Definitely recommended!
Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem
#10Every time someone tells you "You can buy a server for 2000$ why pay Amazon 4500$?" show him/her this article.
I've done on prem in the past, it's a real pain and I still remember it as a horrible experience.
That being said, I think it's pretty easy to combine. One of the things we had in the earlier days is hosting the CI and other build/compile servers @ the office and all the rest was in the cloud.
Even if you have some customer requiring something hosted on prem you can still host ALL OTHER clients on the cloud and this client on prem etc...
Good post.