5 ms·

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;

by azernik 10y ago

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on-prem is non-negotiable, but in my experience customer demands for on-prem are far more likely to be driven by outdated and/or overly-conservative IT practices than by real need.

johnbellone 10y ago
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.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I've learned to live with the meanings of things getting mangled. Once marketing requires that a definition change it's pretty much game over. You can try to fight it but quite often it's the marketing department and customer working together to change how something is defined because it's easier than changing outdated policies or thinking. At that point you're just a stick in the mud, pining for the good ol' days when clouds were just called "other people's computers".
- azernik 10y ago
  Which is what this article does too - they very specifically distinguish between what they call really "on-prem" and "single-tenant", and one of their suggested strategies is to make them go for the latter if at all possible.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I mean, the article linked describes the two scenarios both as "on-prem."
rdtsc 10y ago
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 10y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 10y ago
If you're big, AWS is a huge waste of money.
- devonkim 10y ago
  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 (< 200k http requests / mo) on an intranet look like a stupid cheap bargain. Maybe the oldest crowds do, but past customers of mine have readily paid $5 MM / month for basically a couple Wordpress sites that are on 24/7 deathwatch by human eyes constantly because they've failed to ever get basic monitoring working or it's cheaper to have a human watch than to pay for resources that properly monitor the site for outages and simply reboot. The places that deploy and operate applications (and their infrastructure) like it's 1994 dominate much of the Fortune 100, federal, and state governments. For every hip project with containers and configuration management there's 20 legacy applications operated with legacy methods. These companies want to buy software to throw over the fence to the same people and processes because they've invested decades in their creation and innovation / eliminating waste is so damn difficult in such a culture.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    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.
    - azernik 10y ago
      Because they will be outsourcing a big chunk of that work they do inefficiently (backups, monitoring, provisioning, etc.) to Amazon, which is much better at it. Hence the proliferation of things like hosted AWS Outlook system [1]. Anyone in our Bay Area bubble of efficient IT would say keeping that running for a 2,000-user business is probably... what, a half of a full-time-equivalent of workload, averaged over long periods of time? Less? But Amazon can charge $4/user/month (in this hypothetical company that's round about $100K/year) and it is totally a steal, because a lot of companies will not be able to keep it running it anywhere near that budget. And that is the market they're going for - note that the free trial is 25 users. This is not a product for the small company that just doesn't have the capital to invest in their homegrown solution - that's Google Apps for Work. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

by azernik 10y ago

johnbellone 10y ago

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.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
I've learned to live with the meanings of things getting mangled. Once marketing requires that a definition change it's pretty much game over. You can try to fight it but quite often it's the marketing department and customer working together to change how something is defined because it's easier than changing outdated policies or thinking. At that point you're just a stick in the mud, pining for the good ol' days when clouds were just called "other people's computers".
azernik 10y ago
Which is what this article does too - they very specifically distinguish between what they call really "on-prem" and "single-tenant", and one of their suggested strategies is to make them go for the latter if at all possible.
emodendroket 10y ago
I mean, the article linked describes the two scenarios both as "on-prem."

rdtsc 10y ago

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 10y ago
[deleted]

Spooky23 10y ago

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

devonkim 10y ago
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 (< 200k http requests / mo) on an intranet look like a stupid cheap bargain. Maybe the oldest crowds do, but past customers of mine have readily paid $5 MM / month for basically a couple Wordpress sites that are on 24/7 deathwatch by human eyes constantly because they've failed to ever get basic monitoring working or it's cheaper to have a human watch than to pay for resources that properly monitor the site for outages and simply reboot. The places that deploy and operate applications (and their infrastructure) like it's 1994 dominate much of the Fortune 100, federal, and state governments. For every hip project with containers and configuration management there's 20 legacy applications operated with legacy methods. These companies want to buy software to throw over the fence to the same people and processes because they've invested decades in their creation and innovation / eliminating waste is so damn difficult in such a culture.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  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.
  - azernik 10y ago
    Because they will be outsourcing a big chunk of that work they do inefficiently (backups, monitoring, provisioning, etc.) to Amazon, which is much better at it. Hence the proliferation of things like hosted AWS Outlook system [1]. Anyone in our Bay Area bubble of efficient IT would say keeping that running for a 2,000-user business is probably... what, a half of a full-time-equivalent of workload, averaged over long periods of time? Less? But Amazon can charge $4/user/month (in this hypothetical company that's round about $100K/year) and it is totally a steal, because a lot of companies will not be able to keep it running it anywhere near that budget. And that is the market they're going for - note that the free trial is 25 users. This is not a product for the small company that just doesn't have the capital to invest in their homegrown solution - that's Google Apps for Work. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/