Fig. 01 · Glossary
Cloud Repatriation
Also known as Cloud Exit, Leaving the Cloud, Cloud Exodus
Definition
Cloud repatriation is the migration of workloads off public cloud providers onto owned or colocated hardware. The economics favor stable, well-understood workloads at material spend levels, operated by teams with real infrastructure capability. The best-documented mid-sized case, 37signals, cut a $3.2M annual cloud bill to a fraction after buying its own hardware - with self-reported figures and preconditions (stable workloads, strong ops team) that transfer to few companies unexamined.
Buyers rarely search for “repatriation” - they say “our AWS bill is too high” and “back to on-prem.” The analyst term matters mainly when someone needs validation data to take an exit case to leadership.
The honest decision is a fork: optimize in-cloud (often the right first move) versus exit for the workloads that pass a stability-and-spend screen with operations staffing priced in.
Human Renaissance glossary · operator-grade definitions · Research methodology
