Cloud vs On-Premise might be a trivial question to most of the organization as on today but, even today there are number of companies still sticking on to on-prem versions for various reasons. As per Gartner, market share of cloud computing was growing around 40% even during the pandemic, through which we can draw a conclusion that most of the companies are in the process of adopting cloud for their new initiatives or migrating to cloud technologies for their existing applications. On the other side, as per research and markets.com we could still see the On-Premise deployments are frontrunners with 58% ($1250.27 Million) of market share and with CAGR as 30% for the period 2020–2030. With these numbers in place it is evident that enterprises are developing new technologies should also cater the needs of business who will continue with their On-Prem deployments. So when we develop On-Prem solutions does it mean that we should not rely on cloud offerings? Is On-Prem applications a show-stopper to leverage cloud offerings to business that develops new software/technologies?

Before answering the questions let us share one of our experience on why and how we relied on cloud offerings for an on-prem enterprise application.

Will set a context about the on-prem application before getting into how we leveraged cloud offering.

• An On-premise Master Data Management(MDM) application that can be deployed in private data centers.
• Application has been built with versatility as a primary USP. An example of versatile attribute is “it can be deployed in private data centers where data pipelines relies on native infra (like Spark & HBase clusters) and it can be deployed in public cloud (like AWS, GCP & Azure. while in public cloud it will rely on respective cloud offering for eg: in GCP the application can leverage solutions like BigTable & Dataproc).
• As the nature of the application is to support large B2B enterprise for their MDM requirements it should deliver new features across all the channels along with support.
• Application had its own advantages and difficulties. When it comes to addressing the issues for cloud deployments we did not face issues while debugging as logs were handy. Whereas in On-Prem deployment collecting data to debug was cumbersome and had a lot of turn around time.

On-Prem deployments contributed more than 50% of customer base, and it was crucial to build a system that could address the difficulties that are faced by business who are using the product. Here is where we leveraged cloud offerings to collect data to debug and reduce turn around time.

The following are few pain points with respect to data collection and handling:

• The application in focus had to deal with logs from multiple applications/technologies, configurations, data and few more effective and efficient debugging.
• Based on the issue reported we need to collect only data that’s necessary so that debugging can be rapid.
• Collected data has to be purged after a stipulated timing.
• Data needs to be associated along with support ticket(s).

At this juncture providing seamless experience to the customers and to our support engineering team was the need of the hour. We have decided to build a support application(with-in our cap-ex & op-ex budgets, and it should also be versatile like our core application). With budgetary constraints in place we wanted to see if cloud offerings could help, of course we were able to chalk out an architecture by using the following solutions:

• A CLI interface
• Serverless/Lambdas
• Cloud Storage

All what we had to do is ship a versatile CLI application to business for seamless support experience like:

• By choosing Serverless architecture our operating expenditure was within the budget as we did not have a dedicated setup running 24x7.
• Data stored in cloud will be purged automatically based on the configurations.
• Out of the box call-back implementation helped us with data synchronization across various systems.
• With this implementation in place the turn around time for data collection to debug has been reduced significantly resulting in better customer satisfaction. With this successful implementation we’re also considering leveraging this infrastructure to push our new binaries to business environments.

Let’s revisit the questions that we have raised in first section on this blog and answer them.

When we develop On-Prem solutions does it mean that we should not rely on cloud offerings?

There are ample areas when it comes to application development, if the core offering should rely on On-Prem then stick to the crux and when it comes to ancillary requirements do check out cloud offerings and see if it could fit your requirements and adopt them to leverage out of the box features.

Is On-Prem applications a showstopper to leverage cloud offerings to business that develops new software/technologies?

No, technology or tool can not be showstopper for others. Before adopting a tech see product fitment with right due diligence.

If you have a similar question please feel free to reach out to us by dropping an email to explore@techconative.com, our experts from TechConative will be happy to help you!