A typically controversial post from the CTO of 37signals about moving HEY’s servers out of the cloud has re-ignited the debates around cloud repatriation. To say that ‘opinion is divided’ would be to understate the almost religious nature of the online debate, from the trenchant and sarcastic on one side…
I swear the idea that cloud workload “repatriation” is a good idea gets just more absurd the longer I think about it and it started out pretty high on the absurdity scale.
— Camille Fournier (@skamille) July 14, 2021
…to the hopeful and optimistic on the other. Sometimes we even see both sides represented in the same source:
Many are tempted to follow Corey Quinn when he argues that ‘cloud repatriation isn’t a thing’ and share his cynicism that ‘Far and away the folks who seem the most enthusiastic about cloud repatriation are vendors who stand to gain a heck of a lot if people start turning their backs on public cloud’ on the Duckbill blog. The Duckbill Group helps businesses cut their cloud costs, so it may be fair to conclude from this that most commentators on this have a lot of skin in the game either way1.
On the pro-repatriation side, an often-cited article by Andreessen Horowitz states bluntly as a summary that ‘You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it.’
To summarise: repatriation is both a thing and not a thing depending on who you ask, and is an absurd thing to contemplate while being a crazy thing not to contemplate. How do we calmly make sense of all this?
Is anyone doing it?
It’s fair to say that we are not drowning in examples of high profile businesses that are moving significant chunks of cloud services out of the hyperscalers’ clutches. The poster child for repatriation is Dropbox, who announced in 2016 that they had spent $53 million building a colocated hardware and software infrastructure to store the exabytes of data that are at the core of their business.
Both Dropbox and the HEY example mentioned previously are SaaS businesses, and this is also what the Andreessen Horowitz article focuses on. SaaS businesses are typically businesses ‘born in the cloud’, and so their moving back to on-prem or colocation infrastructure is often considered big news. They are also younger and highly tech-focussed businesses, so also more likely to shout about their move from the rooftops.
Apart from Dropbox and HEY, there have not been many businesses that have made a splash of any cloud repatriation effort. Gartner has also poured cold water on any hype with a paper published in 2019 titled ‘Public Cloud Repatriation Remains the Exception, Not the Rule’.
There have also been notable repatriation reversals, such as Zynga, the mobile gaming company who built their own zCloud infrastructure back in 2011. The exact details of what happened are hard to come by, but the published case study suggests that it was the pace of innovation that brought them back to cloud services: ‘Zynga learned a lot and became proficient at running its data centre infrastructure, but the pace of technology innovation and the new and different demands of mobile gaming brought the company full circle. AWS is innovating on technology at a pace that we simply cannot keep up with.’
Apart from these few examples, there are not many businesses that have completed any kind of repatriation process that want to talk about it in public. There are a few reasons for this, but one is that repatriation need not be a dramatic process or decision.
Repatriation is not all-or-nothing
Some see repatriation as an all-or-nothing activity: you’re either moving completely out of the cloud or you are not. The world is more nuanced than this. According to Andreessen Horowitz, ‘even the most aggressive take-back-their-workloads companies still retained 10% to 30% or more [of their workloads] in the cloud’.
These ‘quiet repatriators’ are likely not making global decisions right across their businesses but rather experimenting with where their workloads are best placed in a piecemeal fashion. This fits with what we see as a consultancy with customers that are more mature in the cloud space.
Determining how many of these quiet repatriators there are in the market is not easy. A Forbes article from 2022 reports a startling statistic that ‘48% of 600 IT decision makers (ITDMs) migrated apps o
