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 hardwar

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.)