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

It's a short simple post that comes down to this:

> Weekly explains that “just running legacy applications in the cloud is prohibitively expensive,” highlighting how lift-and-shift approaches often fail to deliver expected benefits.

Yes, if you have a mature business without active development at a scale where compute/storage costs is a substantial accounting line item, then it makes sense to run on hardware that doesn't have the flexibility and cost of the cloud.

There is an in-between that makes much more sense for most though. Running on provisioned bare metal. Lots of providers offer this as a better performance/price option where you don't have to deal with provisioning hardware but do everything else from the OS+maintenance and up.

At one company we used large bare-metal machine instances provisioned for stable parts of the application architecture (e.g. database and webapp instances) and the cloud for new development where it made sense to leverage capabilities, e.g. DynamoDB with cross-region replication.

I can't tell you how often I've run into cloud deployments that were lift-and-shifts, pushed on by bean counters wanting OPEX instead of CAPEX. They then run into actual cashflow expenses, less stability, more complex security (now you get IAM on top of basic networking!), and the ability for one underpaid person to easily do a lot of damage - because you're certainly not going to hire top-tier cloud talent - these are bean counters running things after all.

It makes it really clear why you so many data leaks via badly configured s3 buckets of dynamo tables...