Pros & Cons of moving Appian on premise to other Cloud than Appian

Certified Associate Developer

I am looking for pointers or detail if Appian on premise needs to be moved to Cloud.

Customer is looking for option among Azure. AWS etc. Need to define pros & cons for that.

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  • Hi,
    I have experience with all variations regarding the installation:

    1. On-premise
    2. Installation on private cloud
    3. Appian Cloud

    Cons for 1+2:

    • Dependency on IT Administration Personal 
    • Risk of getting  the servers rebooted without prior shutting down the Appian Platform (have seen this happen)
    • Risk of running out of disc space and no proper checkpointing  (have seen this happen)
    • Ongoing effort with upgrading to the next Appian version - hard to keep up with, even with the hotfixes (imposing a security thread)

    Pros for 1+2:

    • Ability to configure the Platform to the liking (e. g. number of nodes, or timeout for the database)
      But those are mostly violating Best Practices - so not sure if this is really a pro

    Cons for 3:

    • You can not tweak the configuration of the platform to its limits (Honestly, I don't know what this should be, besides violating Best Practices)

    Pros for 3:

    • No effort with upgrading to the next Appian Version
    • No effort with maintaining the infrastructure (servers)
    • Better performance

    My recommendation: Move to Appian Cloud - you will have peace of mind. And by the way it can be configured in such a way on request that
    the Appian Cloud instance can not be accessed through the Internet. Users have to be on the company network. All data traffic is not traversing the Internet if this might be a concern.

Reply
  • Hi,
    I have experience with all variations regarding the installation:

    1. On-premise
    2. Installation on private cloud
    3. Appian Cloud

    Cons for 1+2:

    • Dependency on IT Administration Personal 
    • Risk of getting  the servers rebooted without prior shutting down the Appian Platform (have seen this happen)
    • Risk of running out of disc space and no proper checkpointing  (have seen this happen)
    • Ongoing effort with upgrading to the next Appian version - hard to keep up with, even with the hotfixes (imposing a security thread)

    Pros for 1+2:

    • Ability to configure the Platform to the liking (e. g. number of nodes, or timeout for the database)
      But those are mostly violating Best Practices - so not sure if this is really a pro

    Cons for 3:

    • You can not tweak the configuration of the platform to its limits (Honestly, I don't know what this should be, besides violating Best Practices)

    Pros for 3:

    • No effort with upgrading to the next Appian Version
    • No effort with maintaining the infrastructure (servers)
    • Better performance

    My recommendation: Move to Appian Cloud - you will have peace of mind. And by the way it can be configured in such a way on request that
    the Appian Cloud instance can not be accessed through the Internet. Users have to be on the company network. All data traffic is not traversing the Internet if this might be a concern.

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