3 ms·
I think unless there is a big turn of the tide, supporting on-prem is just trouble these days. Most large enterprise customers are willing to use SaaS already.
by gomox 10y ago
I think unless there is a big turn of the tide, supporting on-prem is just trouble these days. Most large enterprise customers are willing to use SaaS already.
Forget about the huge issues in the support organization for a second: the impact on-prem has on your release cycle has consequences that are hard to fully grasp. So much for "continuous development and release" if you have to keep supporting old versions of software for a year.
Build your stack so that you can easily migrate clouds (i.e. don't use all the super high-level AWS APIs). It's a good idea in general, and it should make going on-prem doable enough if you are worried about having that option at all.
- old-gregg 10y agoOne of the points the author makes is that "on-prem" these days often mean "someone else's AWS account". When we started about a year ago we suspected it would come up, but today it's turning into a most popular use case. And adopting something like Kubernetes in a smart way largely takes care of your concerns regarding agility. Now, the story time! When I was at Rackspace, I was trying to analyze the top reasons our startup customers would stop using some of our SaaS offerings. The most common one, unsurprisingly, was they'd run out of business. But another top one was "they got successful". As they got bigger and more successful (can't mention names) they'd bring more and more in-house, eventually getting to a point that the only products they were interested in were just servers and bandwidth. So it depends. Some things just don't work well as SaaS, especially for customers with money who can't scale their IT fast enough.