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

I think control is maybe a bigger factor than cost these days. Being able to hold anyone accountable at all seems to be an operational superpower. Working with cloud vendor support is a torturous experience on a good day. It also doesn't matter how expensive the virtual machine is if there isn't one available to be provisioned.

I know it's kind of harsh, but owning the whole vertical and having the power to instantly fire anyone for giving an Azure-tier response is why these companies are doing it in my mind. Waiting on a 3rd party to find their own ass with a whole S&R team every time you need help is quite exhausting. I've never worked with an IT vendor and thought "damn these people are so responsive I can't dream of doing it better myself".

In some regards, absolutely.

But remember even when you're doing everything on-prem with your own employees, you're still running software written by third parties.

So you might still have an unresponsive third party, just they might be a database vendor instead of a cloud vendor.

I work for a small orgthat is owned by a very large corp. Our spending is managed by large corp.

If I want to buy a $10 domain, the process takes a month and requires escalating to a purchasing director. If I want to rent a new server from hetzner, same thing.

If I want to spin up a bedrock instance for $1000/day on AWS - it’s already a line item in the budget so as long as I have a cost tag on the resource it’s pre-approved. As long as something is on the software catalog on AWS it’s ok to use.

Depending on you size, even just having some people from all the open source products on staff is probably cheaper anyway. And gives you pretty good control. And if it used to work the only one that can have broken the config is you, which means you can also fix it. Sure maybe you need to rollback a kernel update or whatever but in the end it's on you.