> for many, many companies the cost of hiring people to manage all this infrastructure and services is usually way more than a well-managed cloud project.
Yea, this is the line that everyone uses. I've worked at these companies, and the reality just doesn't line up with that. You end up still needing your whole Ops team, they're just building cloud tooling instead of on-prem tooling.
As to whether or not the migration away is happening...major cloud providers are already seeing people leave, and profits starting to contract. It's very early. Like I said in the original post, it took us a long time to wind up the cloud and it's going to take a long time to come back to reality.
Something roughly cloud-shaped will probably always remain..there are some legit use cases especially for companies that have spiky load profiles. I don't mean we're literally going back to running servers out of our IT closets. I just mean that as a whole we're going to be moving back to simpler deployments, simpler architectures, and most importantly, fixed/predictable costs.