Just read Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure. It’s available as a free ebook on Microsoft Virtual Academy. I’d like to say that it was a really interesting reading!

In my opinion most of the patterns and ideas described in the book could be (and should be!) applied in on-premises as well. For example

• Octopus allows you to setup a very nice DevOps workflow on-premises.
• In any .NET application you will benefit from using Async/Await approach.
• Any big application should have a good Monitoring and telemetry. I'm personally very happy with Serilog and Metrics.Net
• Using Cache is a great idea for most of the applications. I'm a big fan of Redis
• Dependency Injection is also a must have in most of applications. I like Simple Injector very much.
• Queue-centric work pattern also could be applied in on-premises scenario. You would use RabbitMQ, Redis, Service Broker, etc. for that purpose