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Just bear in mind the kind of enterprise customers that tend to want on prem software _do not_ want to spend a lot of time deploying or maintaining it but the _
by Merad 3y ago
Just bear in mind the kind of enterprise customers that tend to want on prem software _do not_ want to spend a lot of time deploying or maintaining it but the _do_ want you to support the old version that they're running (meaning security updates and probably fixes for major bugs). It's a very different world from your typical CI/CD SaaS product that deploys frequently and only supports the latest version of the software.
The company I'm with supports our releases for two years, most of our products release quarterly, and many of our customers are kind of annoyed because we release too often (in their eyes). We're looking at getting out of supporting the on-prem game, but personally I think it's unlikely because many of our clients are in government and defense.
- physicsguy 3y agoWhen I worked for a big enterprise company writing simulation software, we did quarterly or bi-yearly releases, but the defense clients wanted to run their own verification and validation tests generally, so they maybe upgraded once every 2 or 3 years. When I went to work at a University as a research software engineer, a particularly memorable incident was a research group getting very angry that we were upgrading the cluster to CentOS 7 thus meaning the ancient version of COMSOL they were contractually obliged to use in a contract with Rolls Royce would no longer run at all. We ended up getting something working using Singularity but it was very painful.
- gomox 3y agoWe copied the Ubuntu release schedule to deal with this (rolling release for cloud, LTS + security/bugs for on prem). Its not particularly painful (but we don't provide support for 2 full years).