Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

hivekit.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 93 posts

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#31

Post by j45 »

macrael wrote: post #5

"Third: Package it nicely. Ideally, your customer should be able to download a zip with an executable and some config files from a well designed enterprise page - or get a URL to a Docker Repo. When your on-premise version starts for the first time, it should set itself up as autonomously as possible: Check if it has the required access and permissions, connect to the database to set up tables, have sensible log outp…

On prem can mean self manageable to a small or large degree.

You can also sell a managed on-prem setup where you set it up and maintain it in the client environment.

It’s not a huge pain in the ass as long as the software is reasonably designed to be multi-tenancy as well as multi server. For serverless architectures creating an internal service provider to route to your serverless (or theirs).

A lot of non prem can be made easier by ring azure friendly which in turn has some ways to get on prem easier.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#32

Post by gomox »

Our company does this and it has become a competitive advantage allowing us to get into customers that would otherwise be out of reach. Pretty much every single current offering is SaaS-only so if you want a modern product on prem we're essentially the only game in town.

Operationally speaking we built the products from the ground up to be available either way (at the time, it was a less contrarian take). The resulting cloud architecture is not multitenant (just high efficiency, orchestrated shared hosting). "Multi single tenant" I think they call it these days.

I think its an extremely pragmatic albeit unpopular choice for a B2B SaaS company.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#33

Post by physicsguy »

Merad wrote: post #26

Just bear in mind the kind of enterprise customers that tend to want on prem software _do not_ want to spend a lot of time deploying or maintaining it but the _do_ want you to support the old version that they're running (meaning security updates and probably fixes for major bugs). It's a very different world from your typical CI/CD SaaS product that deploys frequently and only supports the latest version of the soft…

When I worked for a big enterprise company writing simulation software, we did quarterly or bi-yearly releases, but the defense clients wanted to run their own verification and validation tests generally, so they maybe upgraded once every 2 or 3 years.

When I went to work at a University as a research software engineer, a particularly memorable incident was a research group getting very angry that we were upgrading the cluster to CentOS 7 thus meaning the ancient version of COMSOL they were contractually obliged to use in a contract with Rolls Royce would no longer run at all. We ended up getting something working using Singularity but it was very painful.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#34

Post by ianso »

Funny that the article focuses on huge corps for on-prem. I work for a non-profit and we deploy stuff to hardware in Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan... You can't assume the Internet works and if it does, it could be a 1Mbps VSAT connection.

Needless to say we don't have a Fortune 500 budget. When I see a nice, affordable app that says "and here's a Docker image!" next to the SaaS options, I am like ( ˘ ³ ˘ ) ♥

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#35

Post by browningstreet »

michaelt wrote: post #17
macrael wrote: post #5

"Third: Package it nicely. Ideally, your customer should be able to download a zip with an executable and some config files from a well designed enterprise page - or get a URL to a Docker Repo. When your on-premise version starts for the first time, it should set itself up as autonomously as possible: Check if it has the required access and permissions, connect to the database to set up tables, have sensible log outp…

Let's not exaggerate here, the software industry managed to deliver software for on-premise use for several decades.

This is very circular -- yes, that's true.. and because it was so difficult everyone, vendor and customer alike, moved towards SaaS hosted offerings.

There has to be a name for this argument-type: A leads to B, and those who seem to know only B start arguing for A because they don't remember why A lead to B in the first place. I see this all over the place.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#36

Post by amichal »

freeone3000 wrote: post #19
michaelt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not exaggerate here, the software industry managed to deliver software for on-premise use for several decades.

They used things like standardized packaging mechanisms, matrix testing across supported profiles, dedicated staging environments, and sensible logging schemes. These are expensive and time-consuming! Product velocity is greatly increased when less time is spent on such engineering cruft.

AND a several orders of magnitude larger investment in tech writers, and manual "How can my customer break this software" testing.

When I worked in shrink-wrapped software back in dark ages the documentation writing team and a very extensive manual QA department where each the same size as the development department. Think people trying for DAYS to find out why out of 100s of thousands of active users, a few dozen reported being able to launch 2 instances of the main window when that should not be allowed. (Fix: Race condition in the "double click" handling code with a window of a few milliseconds)

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#37

Post by legitster »

> And ultimately, having an on-premise version unlocks certain industries that will simply not buy SaaS under any circumstances. These are specifically security critical industries like Defense, Banking, Insurance etc. - all of which come with sizable software budgets.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The only places still making money off of on-prem installations are charging a premium for it. If a big government account comes up and offers to pay you extra for a special service contract, you're going to do it.

I get the appeal to developers of just throwing out a self-service experience with minimum commitments. But it's not a good, sustainable business model on its own.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#38

Post by gomox »

Merad wrote: post #26

Just bear in mind the kind of enterprise customers that tend to want on prem software _do not_ want to spend a lot of time deploying or maintaining it but the _do_ want you to support the old version that they're running (meaning security updates and probably fixes for major bugs). It's a very different world from your typical CI/CD SaaS product that deploys frequently and only supports the latest version of the soft…

We copied the Ubuntu release schedule to deal with this (rolling release for cloud, LTS + security/bugs for on prem). Its not particularly painful (but we don't provide support for 2 full years).

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#39

Post by koolba »

wolframhempel wrote: post #10
macrael wrote: post #5

"Third: Package it nicely. Ideally, your customer should be able to download a zip with an executable and some config files from a well designed enterprise page - or get a URL to a Docker Repo. When your on-premise version starts for the first time, it should set itself up as autonomously as possible: Check if it has the required access and permissions, connect to the database to set up tables, have sensible log outp…

I really disagree. On-Premise software is frequently bought by large customers with significant resources - including a competent ops team. Yes, there may be some initial handholding, but once things are up and running, there is little support necessary. Basically, if you want to build an on-premise offering, look at the way Nginx, Postgres, Redis and similar projects are packaged and do the same.

> Basically, if you want to build an on-premise offering, look at the way Nginx, Postgres, Redis and similar projects are packaged and do the same.

Nope. You should look at how an app that uses all of those is published. That’s what on-premise software truly is. A combination of dependencies and your companies secret sauce.

Your own app code is just one cog in that engine.

Re: I want to convince you to have an on-premise offering

#40

Post by stuff4ben »

As someone who evaluated software in the CI/CD realm for years working at an enterprisey company, not have an on-prem solution immediately disqualified you. We had to go through so much more red-tape to allow a SaaS offering in the enterprise it just wasnt' worth it. Yes, that's the enterprise for you. It's been a while since I've done that, so hopefully they've gotten better about it.
Post reply on HN