Cloud Repatriation: Is it a Risk For Microsoft Azure?
Cloud repatriation appears to be one of the new IT hot topics of 2023. For companies that invested time and money into transferring some of their workloads to the cloud, why would it now make sense to bring some of them back to on-premises resources? Well, I’ll explain in this article why cloud repatriation is being part of more and more IT-related conversations this year, what the concerns are for customers, and how recent news might cause Microsoft Azure to lose customers.
Watch out: 2023 is another one of those “year of …” years. I’m still waiting on my Linux desktop hosted on a Citrix server (and my jetpack, hovercraft, and flying car), but one of those “year of …” articles caught my interest in early January.
I was sitting in a meeting room, waiting to start a few days of strategizing about business strategy with colleagues, and I started browsing the news. One article on InfoWorld, 2023 Could Be The Year Of Cloud Repatriation caught my attention and had me thinking “what the heck is cloud repatriation?”
I wrongly assumed, at first, that it was about moving services and data to a more local instance of the cloud. I started to read and the sub-heading wrapped up the article nicely:
To explain what cloud repatriation is in clear terms, it’s when an organization decides to leave a public cloud, such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, and bring things back to on-premises.
One of my talking points for 2022 (and 2023) is that organizations have not used a good process to get into the cloud. The “field of dreams” approach is commonly used: a consulting company is hired to build out Azure, the consultants hand the result over to the customer in a series of short workshops, and success will come.
Spoiler alert: it does not. I explained why in my previous 5 Essentials for Successful Cloud Adoption article.
In practice, organizations often undergo complexity shock. Something big and very different is dropped on their heads. A developer might next-next-next their way through an Azure Kubernetes Services deployment and discover that this thing is way more complicated than installing IIS on Windows Server.
In another case, someone might want to secure a web application with a database and find that a private endpoint won’t work (they forgot that DNS is still important in the cloud). As for routing, well, Azure’s version of shutter speed/aperture/ISO (photography terminology) controls all aspects of Azure networking and network security in ways that you must be able to figure out with almost no tooling and rarely available diagnostics data.
All in all, new skills are required within an organization, and this takes some time. I have over 25 years of experience working in IT and I forget how long I’ve been working with Microsoft Azure (you can probably date it by when I started to write about Azure instead of Hyper-V here on Petri.com).
Anyway, even with all that experience, I just know a small percentage of everything Azure-related. I know some stuff, like Azure networking, really well, but I still find new things out in areas that I commonly work with every now and then.
In the end, I can imagine how a cloud newbie might find Azure huge, confusing, and daunting. And that’s before we drop GitHub/DevOps and some infrastructure-as-code language on their head.
The fears and doubts that an organization has before migrating to the cloud change after the migration is completed. One of the top worries is cost management.
I worked with a client, let’s call them XYZ, for much of 2022, helping them move some of their services to Microsoft Azure. Every time we stood up a new resource, the CTO asked questions about costs. We followed good practices for setting up workloads in Microsoft Azure:
But even then, the big topic every week was the cost of using cloud services. The cost of cloud platforms like Azure is very different from traditional IT environments.
