Most businesses need a better strategy than cloud repatriation for problematic applications. These applications hid their inefficiencies while running on premises because we never saw a bill for resource utilization, including storage, network, computing, etc. Often, these applications did not undergo any architecture review when they were built. “It works, doesn’t it?” was the metric that determined success. I would call something that works but costs five times more money in the cloud than on-premises a failure, but most did not.
The compromise approach is to optimize in place. This means doing the bare minimum to get the applications and data sets in a state that minimizes resource use and maximizes optimization when running on a public cloud provider.
Rethinking costs
High cloud costs usually stem from the wrong cloud services or tools, flawed application load estimates, and developers who designed applications without understanding where the cloud saves money. You can see this in the purposeful use of microservices as a base architecture. Microservices are a good choice for some applications but can burn about 70% more cloud resources. Changing the architecture to a more simplistic approach (such as monolithic) can be more cost-effective.