Skip to content

This is the multi-page printable view of this section. .

Return to the regular view of this page.

Cloud Exit Cases

Comparable accounts of successful, partial, abandoned, and reversed cloud exits.

The case library supports a qualified conclusion: cloud exit can work, but not for every workload, organization, or moment. Success stories, partial moves, abandoned migrations, and returns to managed services receive the same template and visual weight.

Six required questions

  1. What moved? Data, compute, storage, network, control plane, and operations.
  2. What stayed? Services deliberately retained and why.
  3. What did it cost? Cash, labor, interruption, and stranded commitments.
  4. How long did it take? Decision, build, migration, stabilization, and payback.
  5. Where did it fail? Surprises, reversals, abandoned scope, and lasting trade-offs.
  6. What would change next time? The team’s own hindsight, not the editor’s guess.

Evidence labels

Every case distinguishes reported facts, modeled values, verified artifacts, and editorial inference. A modeled saving is not renamed as an audited saving. A first-party story is valuable evidence, but its applicability boundary must travel with it.

The first calibration candidates are the DHH/37signals exit, Tantan’s infrastructure economics, Ahrefs, and publicly documented partial exits. They will not appear as completed cases until sources and timelines are reconciled.