Eight months and a full infrastructure budget spent building the wrong architecture — because nobody asked which parts of the pipeline actually needed to be on-prem. Here's a component-by-component framework for deciding on-prem, cloud, or hybrid, based on what each workload actually requires.

The Silent Degradation Trap When a traditional enterprise software service fails, it announces its failure immediately. A database connection drops, a server runs out of memory, or an API gateway emits a barrage of HTTP 500 internal server errors. Incident management tools trigger PagerDuty alerts, on-call engineers step in, and the system is restored. Machine learning models do not fail this way. Machine learning models fail silently. When an input data pipeline breaks, when