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Sigh, it is a paradox. As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate withou

Sigh, it is a paradox. As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate without friction, and I would try to avoid platforms/techs that are not hot upgradable. As a consumer, I want no data tracking. But as a producer, I want data-driven growth, so that I could understand where I did wrong and how to improve it. And data comes from tracking. This paradox is not just limited to the software industry: For example as a consumer, I prefer reading texts. But as a producer, I found videos are easier to monetize because of the attractive/addictive nature. More often than not, the formers which benefit consumers are not justifiable in pure economic senses compared to the latters, thus the reality we are living in nowadays.

monsieurbanana 5y ago
It's not a paradox as much as a difference between you and the public you target. Compared to you, they don't care about tracking, don't want the hassle to set-up on-prem and don't mind or prefer videos over text.
ec109685 5y ago
Why do you want your software on-prem and be responsible for deployment and monitoring,”?
- namelosw 5y ago
  Sorry I wasn't being clear about this part. What I meant is a comparison: If there is an on-prem option, the release, the update/migration, the installation environment, and the documentation on deployment should be carefully crafted. All of these not only require more effort, but also require people to keep in mind not to stomp on things. And even worse, they have to search for potential problems with their imagination because they don't have access to the data with edge cases they're dealing with. If people are not careful, it's very easy to seriously screw things and lost some customers forever. On top of that, if fixes are required, the team usually needs to fix multiple versions over and over, of which the codebase might have drastically changed. The teams are usually less and less "brave" as time goes by. For most SaaS without on-prem options, people can just focus on the functionalities and deploy many, many times a day. For non-critical issues, people don't need to worry about them, just debug what's going on and respond fast, and the issues are very likely fixed in hours. Plus they can use components like Kafka, Elastic Search, or even other SaaS as needed, without having to choose between re-invent things or ask everybody to install a zoo of components in their on-prem solutions. That's one of the key reasons why web application is so popular nowadays compared to what we've done in the 90s desktop applications. Because it enables the "move fast and break things" mentality because more things are fixable in web applications. On-prem is like 90s desktop applications in disguise. Just try to imagine how horrifying if someone breaks the upgrade functionality. Or if one needs to fix a bug in Windows 10, they also need to fix it from like Windows Vista to Windows 10, where the codebases are drastically different. In conclusion, on-prem sounds applaudable to the audiences on HN, but the reality is it doesn't work well for most for-profit businesses.
TechBro8615 5y ago
It’s possible to make self-hostable software that auto updates. Besides, managed deployment and single tenancy are not mutually exclusive. In this case I’m not even asking for self-hostable. I mostly want single tenant. Yes, self-hostable or “bring your own storage” would be cool, but provider-managed single-tenancy at least eliminates a whole class of data security bugs. This way, even if an application-layer dumps all the rows in the database to the client, at least they’re only my rows.

monsieurbanana 5y ago

It's not a paradox as much as a difference between you and the public you target. Compared to you, they don't care about tracking, don't want the hassle to set-up on-prem and don't mind or prefer videos over text.

ec109685 5y ago

Why do you want your software on-prem and be responsible for deployment and monitoring,”?

namelosw 5y ago
Sorry I wasn't being clear about this part. What I meant is a comparison: If there is an on-prem option, the release, the update/migration, the installation environment, and the documentation on deployment should be carefully crafted. All of these not only require more effort, but also require people to keep in mind not to stomp on things. And even worse, they have to search for potential problems with their imagination because they don't have access to the data with edge cases they're dealing with. If people are not careful, it's very easy to seriously screw things and lost some customers forever. On top of that, if fixes are required, the team usually needs to fix multiple versions over and over, of which the codebase might have drastically changed. The teams are usually less and less "brave" as time goes by. For most SaaS without on-prem options, people can just focus on the functionalities and deploy many, many times a day. For non-critical issues, people don't need to worry about them, just debug what's going on and respond fast, and the issues are very likely fixed in hours. Plus they can use components like Kafka, Elastic Search, or even other SaaS as needed, without having to choose between re-invent things or ask everybody to install a zoo of components in their on-prem solutions. That's one of the key reasons why web application is so popular nowadays compared to what we've done in the 90s desktop applications. Because it enables the "move fast and break things" mentality because more things are fixable in web applications. On-prem is like 90s desktop applications in disguise. Just try to imagine how horrifying if someone breaks the upgrade functionality. Or if one needs to fix a bug in Windows 10, they also need to fix it from like Windows Vista to Windows 10, where the codebases are drastically different. In conclusion, on-prem sounds applaudable to the audiences on HN, but the reality is it doesn't work well for most for-profit businesses.

TechBro8615 5y ago

It’s possible to make self-hostable software that auto updates. Besides, managed deployment and single tenancy are not mutually exclusive. In this case I’m not even asking for self-hostable. I mostly want single tenant. Yes, self-hostable or “bring your own storage” would be cool, but provider-managed single-tenancy at least eliminates a whole class of data security bugs. This way, even if an application-layer dumps all the rows in the database to the client, at least they’re only my rows.