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

You can have a 100Gb uplink on a dedicated fibre for less than 1000$/month now. Which is insanely less than cloud bandwidth. Of course there are tons of other costs, but that alone can suffice to justify moving out of the cloud for bandwidth intensive app.

We went to cloud because 1) we only need 3 infra guys to run our entire platform and 2) we can trivially scale up or down as needed. The first saves us hundreds of thousands in skilled labor and the second lets us take on new customers with thousands of agents in a matter of days without having to provision in advance.

1) You may more than pay for that labor in cloud costs, but you can also pretty easily operate rented dedicated hardware with a 3-man team if they know how to do it, the tools to scale are there they're just different.

2) I don't know what your setup looks like, but renting a dedicated server off of Hetzner takes a few minutes, maybe hours at most.

My personal opinion is that most workloads that have a load balancer anyways would be best suited to a mix of dedicated/owned infrastructure for baseline operation and dynamic scaling to a cloud for burst. The downsides to that approach are it requires all of skillset A (systems administration, devops) and some amount of skillset B (public cloud), and the networking constraints can be challenging depending on how state is managed.