Unequivocally, yes on-premises SQL Server Instances are still relevant.
While I’m a firm believer that the cloud is not a fad and is not going away, it’s just an extension of a tool that we are already familiar with. The Microsoft marketing slogan is “It’s just SQL” and for the most part that is indeed true. However, that does not mean that every workload will benefit from being in the cloud. There are scenarios where it does not make sense to move things to the cloud so let’s take a look at a few of them.