Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

In physics, a gallon of water weights 8.34 lbs. (For this analogy, a gallon of water is a unit of work.) And the gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs irregardless if it is sitting on my desk in a physical building, or on your desk, in the cloud. Same weight, same unit of work. same effort. For a brand new, greenfield application, the cloud is a no brainer. I agree 100%. But for legacy applications, and there are so, soooo many, the cloud is just some one else's computer. Yes, the cloud is more scaleable, yes, the cloud is more manageable, and yes, you can control the cpu/storage/memory/network in much finer amounts. But legacy applications are very complicated. They have long tails, interconnections to other applications that cannot immediately be migrated to the cloud. I have migrated clients off of the cloud, back to on premise or to (co-lo) local hosting, because without rewriting the legacy application, the cloud costs are simply too great.

The essence of IT is to apply technology to solve a business problem. Otherwise, why would the business spend the money? The IT solution might be crazy/stupid/complex but if it works, many business simply adopt it and move on. Now, move that crazy/stupid/complex process to the cloud and surprise, it is very, very expensive. So, yes, the cloud is better, but only for some things. And until legacy applications are rewritten on-premise will exist.

One final insight. The cloud costs more. It has been engineered to be so, both from a profitability standpoint(Amazon is a for profit company) but also because the cloud has decomposed the infrastructure of IT into functional subcomponents, each of which cost money. When I was younger, the challenge for IT was explaining to management, the ROI of new servers, expanded networking, additional technology. We never quite got it right and often had it completely wrong. That was because we lacked the ability to account for/track and manage the actual costs of an on-premise operation. Accounting had one view, operations had another view and management had no idea really, why they were spending millions a year and could not get their business goals accomplished. The cloud changed all of that. You can do almost anything in the cloud, for a price. And I will humbly submit, that the cost of the cloud - minus the aforementioned profitability, is what on-premise organizations should have been spending all along. Anyone reading this and who has spent time in a legacy environment, knows that it is basically a futile exercise of keeping the plates spinning. On-premise failed because it could not get management to understand the value on in-house IT.

As I said, the costs are the same. A gallon of water weighs what it weighs regardless of location. It will be interesting to see, I predict the pendulum will swing back.

For business logic at a fairly large school the free and open tools that make the cloud so productive get used here a lot. We get to leverage commodity hardware and network infra very effectively for on-premises[1].

You have to have a good recovery plan for when equipment X’s power supply fails but when deploy is all automated, it’s very easy to overcome swapping bare metal, and easy to drill (practice) during off hours.

This makes it much easier to meet regulatory compliance: either statutory or regulations your org has created internally (e.g. financial controls in-org, working with vulnerable people or children, working with controlled substances, working with sensitive intellectual property.)

Simply being able to say you can pull the plug on something and do forensic analysis of the storage on a device is an important thing to say to stakeholders (carers, carers families, pupil parents.)

I’m so grateful to be living in the modern age when “cloud” software exists[2], but I don’t have to be in the cloud to use it.

The downside: you need trained staff and it’s completely inappropriate if you need any kind of bandwidth, power consumption, or to support round the clock business (which we do not because, out here on the long tail, we work in single city so still have things like evenings weekends and holidays for maintenance!)

— [1] Premise vs premises is one of those “oh isn’t the English language awful” distinctions. Premise is the logical foundation for some other theory (“the premises for my laziness is that because the sky is grey it will probably rain so I’m not going to paint the house”) where as the premise_s_ means physical real estate property (“this is my freshly painted house: I welcome you onto the premises”.)

[2] Ansible, Ubiquiti, arm SBCs like raspberry pi, Docker, LXC, IPv6 (making global routing for more tractable, IPv4 for the public and as an endpoint to get on the VPN.)

what i have generally seen is that storage - blob (s3) or database - is the blocker. Even if you go to k8s, the hassle to manage storage is non-trivial.

And because of this singular fact, startups cannot move to on-premise. You really dont want to manage snapshots, restores, backups.

Anyone can manage application servers.

Surprised no one mentioned a third option: cheap vps providers like digitalocean or vultr. They've become real contenders to big clouds recently, providing managed databases, storage and k8s. And their bandwidth costs are close to what you'd get in colo.