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

This is partially the result of cloud providers and partially business leadership. They, for whatever reason, insufficiently educated their clients on migration requirements. Lift & shift from on-premises to cloud only work for emergency. The shifted resources must be converted to cloud stack, or the cost will be multiples of on-prem costs. Business leadership was (is?) ignoring IT teams screaming of the problem with lift & shift.

Now, businesses shifting back to on-prem because they are still uneducated on how to make cloud useful. They will just shift all non-core activities to XaaS vendors, reducing their own cloud managed solutions.

Source: dealing with multiple non-software, tech firms that are doing just that, shifting own things back to on-prem, non-core resources to XaaS.

I keep reading ´ Lift and shift is bad ‘ on HN - what is the opposite of lift and shift ? ( ´cloud native ´ does not mean much to me). Is it that instead of oracle running on a rented vm you use whatever db your cloud provider is selling you, you move your monolith to a service oriented architecture running in k8s, etc ?

In simple terms, yes.

The term “native” refers to adopting the vendor’s technology stack, which typically includes managed data stores, containerized microservices, serverless functions, and immutable infrastructure.

Thanks.

I work for a very large org, and cloud benefits are not obvious to me ( ie we’re large enough to absorb the cost of a team managing k8s for everyone, another team managing our own data centers around the world etc ).

I view cloud as mutualizing costs and expertise with other people ( engineers and infra), but adding a very hefty margin on top of it, along with vendor lockin.

If you’re big enough to mutualize internally, or don’t need some of the specific ultra scale cloud products, it’s not an obvious fit to me ( in particular , you don’t want to pay the margin )

I understand that for a significant chunk of people it’s useful provided that they use as many mutualizing levers as possible which is what going native is about.

Is my understanding correct ?

Yes, the profit margin for cloud providers is very real—and quite costly.

I think one point that’s often overlooked is the knowledge gap between the engineers at cloud providers (such as systems, platform, or site reliability engineers) and those that an individual company, even a large one, is able to hire.

This gap is a key reason why some companies are willing—or even forced—to pay the premium.

If average or mediocre management skills and a moderately complex tech stack are sufficient, then on-premise can still be the most cost-effective choice today.