What's the point of local installation of Appian

Having a local instance allows you to test configuration changes that you intend to deploy to an on-premise installation.

We have used local installations in the past for such things as building custom start services or testing major configuration changes that could require multiple reboots, as to not disrupt the other developers.

One time I saw a process model that I could have sworn called it's parent process as a child process. Now, without proper validation, a process like that could keep calling itself over and over and over again until the server completely ran out of RAM and crashed. I wonder how long that would take.

I thought about how I would conduct the experiment, and it would be a very quick experiment, maybe too quick! Now where would I run this? Is there a server we're not really using right now? Maybe DevOps wouldn't know WHY it crashed. No, for this kind of thing, I should use a local install.

Local installations are also very good at teaching you, hands on, all the ins and outs of administrating an entire Appian environment, learning how to stop and restart it, recover from various issues, update the custom config files to see how they affect the entire environment, handle security, customize it via the Admin Console. It's an exceptionally valuable tool for learning what it is.

And you can make stuff explode without anyone being especially mad.