As a result of thinking about why some people run their own servers and other people don't, it struck me today that on the modern Internet, things have evolved to the point where we can draw a division between two approaches or patterns to operating systems and services. I will call these the on premise and off premise patterns.

In the on premise approach, you do most everything within a self contained and closed environment of your own systems (a 'premise'). One obvious version of this is when you have a physical premise and everything you work with is located in it. This describes my department, for example, and many similar sysadmin setups; since we operate physical networks, have printers, and so on, we have no real choice but to do things on premise with physical hardware, firewall servers, and so on. However, the on premise approach doesn't require you to be doing internally focused work or for you to have physical servers. You can take the on premise approach in a cloud environment where you're running a web business.

(You can have a rousing debate over whether you can truly have a single on premise environment if you're split across multiple physical locations, or a physical office plus a cloud.)

In the off premise approach, you don't try to have a closed and self contained environment of your own systems and services, a 'premise' that stands alone by itself. Instead you have a more permeable boundary that you reach across to use and even depend on outside things, up to and including things from entirely separate companies (where all you can really do if there's a problem is wait and hope). The stereotypical modern Silicon Valley startup follows an off premise and outsourced approach for as many things as it can, and as a result works with and relies on a whole host of Software as a Service companies, including for important functions such as holding its source code repositories and coordinating development (often on Github).

An off premise approach doesn't necessarily require outsourcing to other companies. Instead I see it as fundamentally an issue of how self contained (and complete) your service environments are. If you're trying to do most everything yourself within an environment, or within a closely connected cluster of them, you're on premise. If you have loosely connected services that you group into different security domains and talk across the Internet to, you're probably off premise. I would say that running your own DNS servers completely outside and independently of the rest of your infrastructure is an off premise kind of thing (having someone else run them for you is definitely off premise).

While there's clearly a spectrum in practice, my impression is that on premise and off premise are also mindsets and these mindsets are generally sticky. If you're in the on premise mindset, you're reflexively inclined to keep things on premise, under your control; 'letting go' to an outside service is a stretch and you can think of all sorts of reasons that it'd be a problem. I suspect that people in the off premise mindset experience similar things in the other direction.

(As you might guess, I'm mostly an on premise mindset person, although I've been irradiated by the off premise mindset to a certain extent. For example, even though I'm in no hurry to run my own infrastructure for email, I'm even less likely to outsource it to a provider, whether GMail or anyone else.)