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So You Wanna Go On-Prem

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Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#21

Post by azernik »

rdtsc wrote: post #15
twakefield wrote: post #13

This is a great post. We've been talking to a lot of people about going "on-prem". This post is right on in that the deployment is the relatively easy part. The ongoing operations is where you will get killed. Luckily, for those that are thinking about doing this, for the end customers "on-prem" many times means single-tenant, private cloud (usually AWS) which makes things slightly easier (as the op mentions). The ve…

> for the end customers "on-prem" means single-tenant, private cloud (usually AWS) Nope. On prem means in their own private data center. Also possibly airgapped from the outside.

Depends on the customer. Often, the motivations that push them to demand on-prem can be fulfilled just as well by a less-demanding single-tenant SaaS solution; you just have to convince the customer's IT department that such a thing exists.

Sure, there are some (mostly in defense, finance, and a few other security-sensitive fields) where physical on-prem is non-negotiable, but in my experience customer demands for on-prem are far more likely to be driven by outdated and/or overly-conservative IT practices than by real need.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#22

Post by agibsonccc »

Doing on prem is hard but worth it. The sales cycles look different than SAAS but I don't see it going anywhere for a long time.

The key to this is a field team and a good support infrastructure.

Operationalizing it is half of it which is (echoing another poster here) the key to making it economical.

Our on prem stuff targets hadoop/spark clusters though so typically there's already ops folks in place who understand how our stuff works. This obviously won't be true for all scenarios though..

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#23

Post by johnbellone »

azernik wrote: post #21
rdtsc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for the end customers "on-prem" means single-tenant, private cloud (usually AWS) Nope. On prem means in their own private data center. Also possibly airgapped from the outside.

Depends on the customer. Often, the motivations that push them to demand on-prem can be fulfilled just as well by a less-demanding single-tenant SaaS solution; you just have to convince the customer's IT department that such a thing exists. Sure, there are some (mostly in defense, finance, and a few other security-sensitive fields) where physical on-prem is non-negotiable, but in my experience customer demands for on…

What you're describing is a private, separated installation on the Internet. In all cases "on-prem" is inside of a customer's datacenter/office.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#24

Post by rdtsc »

azernik wrote: post #21
rdtsc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for the end customers "on-prem" means single-tenant, private cloud (usually AWS) Nope. On prem means in their own private data center. Also possibly airgapped from the outside.

Depends on the customer. Often, the motivations that push them to demand on-prem can be fulfilled just as well by a less-demanding single-tenant SaaS solution; you just have to convince the customer's IT department that such a thing exists. Sure, there are some (mostly in defense, finance, and a few other security-sensitive fields) where physical on-prem is non-negotiable, but in my experience customer demands for on…

For some, but depending on markets (say DoD) on prem means air-gapped. Basically in last 5 years less than 10% of our customers agreed to that sort of a managed AWS VPC deal.

A lot of the time, the direct customer doesn't even want the hassle either, they want a solution that works. But they are forced by rules and regulation, and their own customers.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#25

Post by johnbellone »

As an operations person who has dealt with deployment of different "on-prem" software in the enterprise please keep in mind that smaller organizations have different needs then the larger enterprise. For a smaller organization a VMware disk image (commonly referred as an appliance) works quite well. But for larger organizations with operations folks we expect to be able to scale individual pieces of the stack or use our own managed infrastructure (e.g. MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ).

If you're targeting the larger enterprise you can expect to have a somewhat more technical IT person to deal with, and if its a technical organization people who are keen on scaling the application/infrastructure independently.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#26

Post by ryaniscool »

This topic is mildly amusing because I remember when all (or most) software was sold as "on-prem". Then everything moved to SaaS...and now everything is moving back to on-prem!

I used to work for Atlassian which made most of its money at the time I left in 2013 from on-prem software. It was low-touch, high-volume sales to people downloading and installing software on their own servers. They still sell a ton of it too.

If your stack is a hodge podge of web servers, shell scripts, and cron services, I think better advice would be based on how to make your application more packageable before moving to that model.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#27

Post by telecuda »

Synology DiskStations are an affordable option (A few tips from experience: if you can get them to put it on a dedicated IP, even better; use Synology firewall to limit access to your servers IPs, or VPN (do not leave on public net, because ransomware); set to auto-update the OS (because the customer never will!); still have another backup (even a USB-attached 1TB solid state drive, but ideally another physical location); disable all unused services (to limit potential exploits); if customer allows, give them a user and you a user - enable logging and now you can demonstrate if/when you had to access their box for maintenance (feel good factor)

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#29

Post by koolba »

telecuda wrote: post #27

Synology DiskStations are an affordable option ( A few tips from experience: if you can get them to put it on a dedicated IP, even better; use Synology firewall to limit access to your servers IPs, or VPN (do not leave on public net, because ransomware); set to auto-update the OS (because the customer never will!); still have another backup (even a USB-attached 1TB solid state drive, but ideally another physical loca…

> Synology DiskStations are an affordable option (You're joking right? What enterprise would install a consumer NAS in their data center to use for "data storage accessible to your web application"?

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Attached...

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#30

Post by NegativeLatency »

ryaniscool wrote: post #26

This topic is mildly amusing because I remember when all (or most) software was sold as "on-prem". Then everything moved to SaaS...and now everything is moving back to on-prem! I used to work for Atlassian which made most of its money at the time I left in 2013 from on-prem software. It was low-touch, high-volume sales to people downloading and installing software on their own servers. They still sell a ton of it too…

Or you could copy tableau and shove it all into a vm
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