We spent €100k migrating to the cloud. Then we spent €100k migrating back.
Eighteen months after the migration, critical workloads were back on-premise.
What went wrong wasn’t the cloud. The assumption was that moving would fix things.
Their on-premise system was tightly coupled, hard to scale, and expensive to maintain. They assumed the cloud would solve this. Instead, they got:
• The same tight coupling is now distributed across availability zones • The same scaling problems now with unpredictable monthly bills • The same maintenance burden plus new cloud-specific complexity
The architecture didn’t change. Only the hosting bill did.
Here’s what they learned:
Migration is not modernization. Moving a monolith to the cloud gives you a cloud-hosted monolith. The problems travel with the code.
The cloud amplifies, not fixes. Good architecture becomes more scalable. Bad architecture becomes more expensive.
Lift-and-shift is technical debt with a new address. You’re not paying down debt, you’re relocating it.
The cloud is a powerful tool. But tools don’t fix design. If your architecture is fighting you on-premise, it will fight you in the cloud with a larger budget.
Before your next migration: is this a hosting problem or an architecture problem?