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So You Wanna Go On-Prem

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Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#51

Post by Spooky23 »

devonkim wrote: post #48
Spooky23 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're big, AWS is a huge waste of money.

If you're big and are a typical company bad at IT, AWS is a massive cost savings. Most HN readers probably aren't very familiar with the costing and the line item levels of bureaucracy in Fortune 500 enterprise IT that makes AWS bills of $200k / mo for maybe 10 lightweight websites ( These companies want to buy software to throw over the fence to the same people and processes because they've invested decades in their…

I don't see how a company terrible at managing IT will magically improve with AWS. Maybe they won't get killed as badly by EMC and shift wastage to various AWS services.

I'm not knocking Amazon -- just saying that you can deliver most enterprise workloads cheaper.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#52

Post by [deleted] »

rdtsc wrote: post #24
azernik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#53

Post by cgarrigue »

capkutay wrote: post #28

I wonder if there's an inverse 'So you wanna go SaaS' for on-prem only companies...

Going to SaaS can be quite an issue depending on the reliability of the company developing the software. One of the company I'm dealing with as a reseller had the bad habit of delivering releases with semi-critical issues and even regression bugs, consequently with my colleagues we decided to act as a buffer, doing a pass of QA ourselves, and depending on the results making the versions available or not to our customers. Sometimes it took one year before getting an good enough release. Quite annoying to do this ourselves, but at least our customers are satisfied with the quality.

Now a year ago the partner decided to deliver a SaaS version, which made completely sense commercially. Then the SaaS became public a month ago and we keep encountering critical issues, like features not working, translation files older than the last on-prem release, or even impossibility to log in because somebody installed a patch and never checked anything after (and never told us about it either). But this time we cannot buffer anything, so they are basically shooting themselves in the foot.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#55

Post by dingaling »

blazespin wrote: post #50
hdmoore wrote: post #46

I honestly thought this was satire for the first half of the article. When did working on SaaS products exempt people from understanding how to deliver software? Should we just remove the first [S] from SaaS? I see this attitude a ton in conversations with startups. A founder describes their whiz-bang thing, a question comes up about how this works in larger environments, usually followed by a mumbled reply about vir…

The problem with maintaining the install is that it really slows down your deployment of feature and evolving the ecosystem. It's not just a matter of extra know how. SaaS is more than just ease of use, it's a very very rapid and competive delivery of new features day in day out. Companies are adopting SaaS not just because they don't want to maintain the infrastructure / install software. They're adopting SaaS becau…

> so they can compete better against their colleagues that don't have the latest and greatest

But there's nothing exclusive about SaaS and often our rivals' logos are already on the SaaS vendor's pitch-deck

Buy for equivalence, build for advantage. SaaS provides out-of-the-box solutions for basic functionality like HR or payroll and allows a company to deploy its programmers where they can build an advantage over their competitors in the domain of business logic.

SaaS is the new MS Word; just buy whatever everyone uses and get on with using that to do the things that actually make money.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#56

Post by grantlmiller »

gkoberger wrote: post #9
apitts wrote: post #4

For 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!

We do what we can to ease the pain of going on-prem for modern SaaS companies :)

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#57

Post by tomjen3 »

davidmr wrote: post #45

This is a subject near and dear to my heart, albeit from the "enterprise" side of the table, not the scrappy startup side. I've spent a non-trivial amount of effort trying to convince software companies to spin an on-premise version of their software. Sometimes with success, and sometimes not. I understand that it's quite attractive to rely on AWS or GCE abstractions to the point where it would be nearly impossible t…

Given how much code is on github, I no longer think protection of intellectual property is a valid excuse. It may be a requirement from your boss.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#59

Post by kordless »

davidmr wrote: post #45

This is a subject near and dear to my heart, albeit from the "enterprise" side of the table, not the scrappy startup side. I've spent a non-trivial amount of effort trying to convince software companies to spin an on-premise version of their software. Sometimes with success, and sometimes not. I understand that it's quite attractive to rely on AWS or GCE abstractions to the point where it would be nearly impossible t…

The problem is with licensing and trusted deployments. Having done the high level of the architecture for one possible solution, I can tell you we are about 3-4 years out before this is common practice.

Re: So You Wanna Go On-Prem

#60

Post by carterehsmith »

Spooky23 wrote: post #32
azernik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're big, AWS is a huge waste of money.

Not true. There are big and sophisticated companies (the likes of Apple and Netflix) that use AWS.
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