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> Intentionally knee capping on-prem software feature wise Or unavoidably. We have a SaaS product that's also available onprem - because we have some big enter

> Intentionally knee capping on-prem software feature wise Or unavoidably. We have a SaaS product that's also available onprem - because we have some big enterprise customers who won't accept anything else - but there's a bunch of stuff we take advantage of in the cloud that we can't easily replicate in arbitrary onprem environments. So the onprem software ends up "kneecapped" just out of sheer pragmatism. There's not a single missing feature onprem that isn't because it would be too much effort to implement and support it. > Stifle development of the on-prem product Similar issue here. We have finite engineering resources, and onprem is a fraction of revenue. > Force you to use some parts of their cloud services to make other things work See first point. > Poor documentation how to install/use/maintain the software on-prem or make it needlessly complex See second point. In short, many of the things you're saying are indeed disadvantages of onprem products today, but it's often not the result of some sort of "intentional kneecapping" or "dark patterns". In my direct experience, it has never been the result of that.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
Would you mind giving an example of something that is easy in cloud but hard on prem (all I can think of is scaling up (down?) which seems kinda obviously hard)
- antonvs 3y ago
  Scaling is definitely one, but another big category is just depending on other cloud services, whether it's message queues, managed databases, object storage, ML training pipelines, software-defined networking, whatever. In any of those cases, we either have a choice to implement and support some onprem alternative, require the customer to provide the necessary service locally (which is not particularly effective for all sorts of reasons), or simply disable features onprem. In the cloud, we get significant benefits from using managed services. Onprem, we not only lose those benefits, we have to pay an additional cost in terms of making our code support both environments and building out the deployment and support of the services in question. It's really exactly the same issues that make cloud attractive to businesses in the first place.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

Would you mind giving an example of something that is easy in cloud but hard on prem (all I can think of is scaling up (down?) which seems kinda obviously hard)

antonvs 3y ago
Scaling is definitely one, but another big category is just depending on other cloud services, whether it's message queues, managed databases, object storage, ML training pipelines, software-defined networking, whatever. In any of those cases, we either have a choice to implement and support some onprem alternative, require the customer to provide the necessary service locally (which is not particularly effective for all sorts of reasons), or simply disable features onprem. In the cloud, we get significant benefits from using managed services. Onprem, we not only lose those benefits, we have to pay an additional cost in terms of making our code support both environments and building out the deployment and support of the services in question. It's really exactly the same issues that make cloud attractive to businesses in the first place.