The shift away from the public cloud by companies like 37signals marks a moment of reckoning for an industry that spent the last decade preaching infinite scalability and “as-a-service” convenience. What once seemed like the inevitable future of computing, outsourcing infrastructure entirely to hyperscalers, is now being reassessed through the lens of cost, performance, and control. The so-called “great unclouding” is not a rejection of cloud technology itself, but of the assumptions that it is always cheaper, simpler, or strategically wiser. For mature companies with predictable workloads, owning the hardware again is beginning to look less like nostalgia and more like discipline.
It’s fascinating to see this pendulum swing back. As cloud providers consolidate power and margins tighten, organizations are rediscovering the virtues of locality, efficiency, and ownership. Hybrid models will remain, of course, but the narrative is changing: cloud is no longer the default, it’s a choice that must be justified. In that sense, the unclouding is not just technical, it’s philosophical. It challenges a generation of developers and executives to think beyond convenience and to measure architecture in terms of accountability, economics, and long-term resilience.
Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation - The New Stack