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C6. Consider carefully the circumstances under which it makes sense to run a workload on premises

While we have so far emphasized that the public cloud should be viewed as a first choice for new applications, and that existing applications ought to include future compatibility with the public cloud as a design consideration driving their architectures closer to the cloud over time, we recognize that there remain conditions under which it makes sense to run an application on premises. For example,

  • there may be data locality requirements imposed by regulations concerning data used in an application that precludes its hosting off-site
  • there may be misalignment between resource demand and costs for the metered services that would make up a PaaS or IaaS solution.
  • the service under consideration could be a significant dependency of another service that runs on premises.
  • there may be no SaaS or highly managed PaaS solution exists for a particular use case, and its service owners lack the expertise within their units to manage a less-abstracted PaaS, or IaaS service model.
  • a service owner might have deep expertise in management and configuration of lower, supporting infrastructure, their application is tightly coupled to that infrastructure, and requires said infrastructure to run in a non-standard configuration.

All these circumstances might lend themselves to running an application on-premises. But, as best practice, such circumstances should become the exception, rather than the rule, over time.

There do exist specific types of computing that Virginia Tech does extremely well on-premises, such as DoIT’s High Performance Computing service. This is the type of computing that remains on premises and will continue to have an advantage. The Division also has talent and experience with building out complicated systems on-premises. These advantages of building out infrastructure remain for special circumstances and will continue to expand for research and development to provide a menu of options for all aspects of the University to consider.