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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

Building an on-premise deployment requires a maturity of company that is quite rare for a startup to have:

* It’s much easier to do on-prem if you do a monolith, or at least a small number of services.

* You have to build and test your application against a range of OS and hardware combinations. You’ll almost certainly need to support RHEL, and probably Windows Server 20XX. Many companies won’t let you use Docker.

* Your software need to be tolerant of infrequent updates. Customers expect some level of stability in practice.

* You need to integrate licensing checks.

* You need to build an installer (that works out of the box…)

* You’ll need to agnostically support the common parts of SAML/OpenID for Auth only, and not rely on any bespoke features from a commercial provider like Auth0 or AzureAD.

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There's a response now on the hivekit blog that mentions this point: https://hivekit.io/blog/mesolithic-architecture/

Seems like everything is rare for a startup to have.

Productisation, infrastructure expertise?

Why do anything?

I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's the sort of thing that requires a technical cofounder with a fairly clear vision of what they want to achieve and with the knowledge and experience doing so.

I worked until recently at a traditional engineering industry focused startup company which decided to deploy a Python application on-premise to a big customer. From the use case it was very clear to me that an on-prem deployment of the software was likely to be on the cards, but there was nobody there in the non-technical leadership to say at the beginning "wait a second, maybe we shouldn't write this in Python for this use case".

> Seems like everything is rare for a startup to have.

It is.

> Why do anything?

Don't, unless it's 100% critical for success. You have to run super lean as a startup. You don't have time for ANYTHING except validating your business.

There are still plenty of customers who still run 32 bit windows 2000 or xp installations :( on prem support is often a world of pain :(

Yep. In one past job we had an issue with a large well-known semiconductor company who were very angry at us for releasing a version of the software compiled on RHEL7 despite RHEL6 having been out of support for a long time by that point. We ended up having to spin up a VM and compile them a bespoke version using an old enough version of glibc that they could still run it.

Regarding number of services, I’m optimistic this will get better shortly if you follow the FaaS paradigm.

In particular if you deploy in Cloudflare’s style you can deploy workerd as a single binary and load it up with your functions.

It’s a little immature right now and persistent storage can be a problem though.

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