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Comment by jaylittle | Hacker News Reader

One day the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. Until then, those of us who disagree with putting absolutely everything into the cloud will just have to sit back and bide our time.

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> will just have to sit back and bide our time

I doubt that day will ever come without a significant number of potential customers stubbornly opting to go it alone with DIY on-prem alternatives (or at least somewhat SaaS-less - e.g. turnkey-on-IaaS or similar) in the interim. Though I guess that "stubborness" might become more likely as more & more stagnation & inflexibility of cloud SaaS reveals itself to customers over the coming years.

My company's recently been pushed off JIRA on-prem to their cloud offering & the migration has already been an absolute travesty. Any gaps there might have been in the near-universal hatred of JIRA have been thoroughly wiped out by now.

I'd agree, lock-in and subscriptions are too tasty a target to give up voluntarily

Or, you know, a SaaS cloud company could go belly-up and lose a ton of customer data with absolutely no backup or other compensation plan. "Suing the corpse" only works if the corpse hasn't already been looted. If that happens five or six times, it might swing the public perception.

For many companies anything but on-prem is not an option.

edit: and in fact the DC edition is still an option.

Russia is probably an outlier here, but the pendulum here is swinging back to on-prem, especially if the cloud provider is located in a different country. (Example: former McDonalds recently bought an on-prem solution from our company, although we have a cloud version, too). Today you're on good terms with a cloud provider, tomorrow the politics go 360° and all your data is lost. Probably not not as urgent in the first world, but with the current segmentation of the Internet happening (e.g. restrictions in EU), I wouldn't be so certain about it.

>360

I meant 180, of course :)

ELMA :-)

If you mean Elma CRM, then no, we have a different product.

37signals is certainly looking in the other direction: https://once.com/ .. though more at the smaller end of the market, not enterprise apps.

But they have also announced that Basecamp will always be a subscription product, which doesn’t fit well with their once.com story.

Can't imagine it's good business to scare the existing customers away.. ;-)

But yeah, I think this is more dipping a toe into the water. They seem to be focusing on entirely new products with a reasonable small scope. It's interesting to see it happen, though, and they're moderately influential.

Can’t say I agree. I believe the method of distributing software historically was limited due to no easy access to public computing. Now the software distributor can more easily provide the software to the customer.

If ”cloud” was available in the 90s, I doubt that self hosting would have been as popular. Not saying its a wrong choice, just a matter of convenience.

Organizations will do whatever they think is cheaper.

Convenience doesn’t matter. The manager will say that SaaS costs half as much and then we get the direction to move.

When the pendulum swings to “On-Premise will cost half as much”, we will get the direction to move back.

Not gonna happen unless a new server OS arrives that's significantly easier to use than Linux.

The core diff between on-prem and cloud isn't where the data is hosted. It's that in one case someone else handles UNIX BS and in the other case you do. Get a MacOS-equivalent level of usability for servers in a form that isn't rent it by the hour, and you could see such a migration, but what's the incentive for anyone to build or support that when people are willing to pay so much for cloud services?

Curious what you see as the "UNIX BS" in running a server?

Is it the need to CLI? Or just the number of knobs that you can frob? Too many choices?

Interested in how such a server system might look.

Almost total absence of GUIs and proper documentation. A big part of why people pay for AWS and friends is not instant scalability or even the fancy features, but simply because clouds wrap a half-way decent GUI around high level server oriented tasks combined with an actual task focused user guide.

To compare, try comparing the docs and GUI help you get deploying a simple serverless app to Lambda+RDS vs configuring a Linux box with systemd, apache/nginx, SSL termination, postgres, borgbackup or whatever other stack you want to use. The difference is night and day. The systemd docs alone are classic Linux BS culture. UNIX sysadmin is complicated in very fundamental and deep ways for people who don't have a gray beard. I know how to do it but I don't enjoy it, and I had to recently teach a friend of mine how to do basic tasks. He's a pro software dev with years of experience incl at Google but sysadmin was never something he needed to do. Luckily now ChatGPT can help a lot with the missing usability.

Thanks for sharing that.

I think the documentation aspect is often overlooked. Even RedHat's subscriber-only documentation is ... quite dense, and yet, not very deep.

They're trying to document a system that wasn't designed with usability or GUIs in mind and they have a perverse incentive to keep Linux hard to use because that drives support subscriptions.

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