Technology

That's the thing, 'cloud' is just another tool in your toolbox. It's the right tool for some workloads and the wrong one for others. The fact they've shifted the work to their own servers and kept the ops team suggests it was the wrong sort of workload to be in the cloud in the first place.

For a while there was an obsession with moving everything to the cloud, and that was always going to be an expensive mistake in a number of different ways. Hopefully, as the hype dies down more nuanced decisions will be made. There's a whole gamut of options between all in the cloud and all in the data centre, and when people jump straight from one end to the other I'm put in mind of Hamlet's quote "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Understand your workload, understand your business' future plans and their needs, and then make a plan, considering all the tools at your disposal.

As long as you realize that the "cloud" is someone else's computer, it is a very viable way of hosting your service. However as your service grows all those micro services that your cloud provider charges you for will grow as well. Eventually you'll get to the point where "data transfer" costs begins to make up >50% of your total cloud spend. At that point (or ideally before) you should have a plan to stop expanding your cloud footprint, because that cost grows geometrically with the size of your cloud data and the number of cloud functions you are using on your data.

Remember Data has Weight. If you don't understand what that means, you aren't ready to make a cost comparison between cloud-hosting and data center hosting.