Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

I would guess that all of these companies that are moving back are throwing in the towel on their cloud migration/modernization plans under the guise of "repatriation" when it's really poor execution without any responsibility.

It was easy when everyone was spending cheap money for marketing and other vanity around moving to the cloud. But now that money costs something, and everyone has to control costs, repatriation is the new hotness when you want to save opex with capex. Cloud margins are org savings.

The trick is to not care, and be proficient as a technologist; you make money either way riding the hype cycle wave. Shades of Three Envelopes for the CIO and whomever these decisions and budgets roll up to.

https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/

(If you genuinely get value out of premium compute and storage at a cloud provider, you're likely going to keep doing that of course, startups, unpredictable workloads, etc)

Our poor strategic planning for cases where migration wasn’t necessary/feasible in the first place

One of the things about startups is that if you’ve got any external validation, gcp/aws/azure will give you 2-3 years worth of free credits. When money is tight, free compute goes a long way.