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

I don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right?

Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.

aws and other hyperscalers will keep growing, no doubt. Public cloud adoption is at around 20%. So the new companies that migrate into the cloud will keep the growth going. That doesn't deny the fact that some might be repatriating though. Especially ones that couldn't get the benefits out of the cloud.

One thing I've seen in every startup I've been in over the last decade is that cloud asset management is relatively poor. Now I'm not certain that enterprise is better or worse, but ultimately when I think back 10+ years ago resources were finite. With that limitation came self-imposed policing of utilization.

Looking at cloud infrastructure today it is very easy for organizations to lose sight on production vs frivolous workloads. I happen to work for an automation company that has cloud infrastructure monitoring deployed such that we get notified about the resources we've deployed and can terminate workloads via ChatOps. Even though I know that everyone in the org is continuously nagged about these workloads I still see tons of resources deployed that I know are doing nothing or could be commingled on an individual instance. But, since the cloud makes it easy to deploy we seem to gravitate towards creating a separation of work efforts by just deploying more.

This is/was rampant in every organization I've been a part of for the last decade with respect to cloud. The percentage of actual required, production workloads in a lot of these types of accounts is, I'd gather, less than 50% in many cases. And so I really do wonder how many organizations are just paying the bill. I would gather the Big cloud providers know this based on utilization metrics and I wonder how much cloud growth is actually stagnant workloads piling up.