On-Premises or Hosted?

The first option to consider is whether you want to use an on-premises continuous delivery pipeline or use a hosted service. For on-premises, the organization becomes the maintenance and service provider for the tools and infrastructure, including hardware, networking, upgrades to newer versions, and support issues. Organizations that typically use on-premises tools do so either because of an existing investment in on-premises tools, or because of a corporate policy that forbids source code hosting outside of the company. Beyond compliance, there are benefits to having a local solution—one of them being the capability to fully control and customize the continuous delivery pipeline as needed, whether that includes integration into custom tools, authentication mechanisms, or existing workflows.

Hosted infrastructure is the alternative to on-premises deployment. Infrastructure is hosted on external servers, usually optimized for scale and geographical region distribution. The host is responsible for all maintenance and management, usually with guarantees of availability and performance through a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Updates to the service are managed by the hosting company, but you do lose full control of hosting the service yourself.

While many companies are using on-premises tools today, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions continue to grow in popularity and richness. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2018, almost 28% of the worldwide enterprise application marked will be SaaS-based (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=252568).