Over the past decade, cloud-first strategies have dominated IT decision-making and migration strategies. The drive to the public cloud has been fast, with organizations expecting infinite scalability, flexibility, and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Many organizations that have been undertaking rapid digital transformation have seen large scale applications and data migration to their chosen cloud providers. Yet, as organizations mature in their cloud journey, a different story is emerging, with cloud repatriation becoming a focal point for many.

The operational realities of public cloud environments have led to a rising concern that not all workloads are suitable for cloud hosting. In some extreme cases, businesses have reported spiraling cloud costs, performance bottlenecks, and a loss of control.

As a result, we are definitely seeing an uptick in cloud repatriation: the strategic process of moving workloads from public cloud providers back to a private cloud bare metal infrastructure. This isn’t about abandoning cloud computing; it’s about evolving beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s about smart workload placement, ensuring that every application runs on the platform that best serves its technical and business requirements. For a growing number of businesses, that platform is bare metal.

This guide will explore the drivers behind this shift and outline a practical cloud repatriation process, showing you how moving to a bare metal environment with a trusted partner like Atlantic.Net can unlock significant cost savings, superior performance, and enhanced control.

Which Cloud Workloads Run Better on Bare Metal?

The true performance bottleneck for certain applications is not the cloud ecosystem itself, but a hypervisor’s virtualization layer. While excellent for general-purpose computing, this abstraction creates issues for workloads highly sensitive to latency, I/O, and performance consistency, prompting discussions around risk mitigation.

I/O-Intensive Relational Databases (Oracle, MS SQL, large PostgreSQL)

In a virtualized cloud environment, databases often suffer from the “noisy neighbor” effect, where shared storage causes unpredictable I/O latency. The hypervisor also adds a small “tax” to every operation, creating a performance ceiling that simply adding more resources cannot overcome.

On bare metal, the database gets direct, uncontended access to NVMe storage, eliminating latency jitter. With 100% of the CPU’s power dedicated to its processes, performance increases significantly.

Latency-Sensitive Platforms (High-Frequency Trading, Ad Bidding)

For applications where microseconds matter, the unpredictable network “jitter” and CPU scheduling delays inherent in a cloud environment are untenable. A momentary delay can directly impact revenue.

Bare metal provides the ultra-low, predictable network latency these platforms demand. It also allows critical processes to be pinned to specific CPU cores, guaranteeing consistent execution times without hypervisor or tenant interference.

Network-Bound Big Data & HPC Clusters (Hadoop, Spark)

The performance of many big data and High-Performance Computing (HPC) jobs is limited by the speed of data shuffling between nodes. On a shared cloud network, this critical phase can become a major bottleneck, slowing job completion.

A bare metal cluster can be designed with a dedicated, high-speed network backplane (e.g., 25 GbE or 100 GbE) for internode communication, significantly accelerating these data-intensive tasks.

The decision is not about abandoning the cloud but choosing the right compute model for the workload.

Why the Shift Back from the Public Cloud?

The conversation around cloud repatriation often begins with performance and compliance, but the reasons run much deeper. While achieving low latency for mission-critical applications or meeting the strict data residency requirements of heavily regulated industries are critical drivers, the move is often a calculated business decision focused on long-term sustainability and control.

Unpredictable Cloud Costs vs. Predictable Savings

The most significant catalyst for repatriation is cost optimization. The flexible pricing model of the public cloud, once its main selling point, can become a financial headache for the wrong workload, making saving money a priority for many organizations. Hidden charges and variable expenses often lead to bill shock with the hyperscale providers

  • Data Egress Fees: The most notorious expenses is data egress fees. Public cloud providers nearly always charge significant fees simply to move your own data out of their network, which can make analytics, backups, and multi-cloud strategies very expensive.
  • Spiraling Storage and Compute Costs: As data volumes grow and applications scale, storage costs and compute resources on the cloud can quickly exceed budgets. The per-gigabyte or per-hour pricing model adds up, especially for steady-state workloads that run 24/7.
  • Operational Overhead: Managing costs in a complex public cloud environment requires specialized tools and expertise, adding to the total cost of ownership.

In contrast, a bare metal on-premises environment—or more accurately, a dedicated environment in a provider’s data center—offers predictable, transparent pricing. With a fixed monthly cost for your dedicated hardware, you can budget effectively without fearing unexpected spikes in your bill. This shift from a variable operational expenditure (OpEx) model to a predictable, fixed one allows for genuine long-term cost savings, enhancing overall cost efficiency and a clearer ROI.

Performance, Control, and Vendor Lock-in

With Shared Cloud Hosting, you share underlying hardware with other tenants, leading to resource contention and unpredictable performance, posing reliability challenges for latency-sensitive or I/O-intensive applications.

Bare metal eliminates this issue entirely. You get 100% of the server’s compute resources—CPU, RAM, and I/O—dedicated solely to your cloud workloads. This direct, uncontended access allows you to optimize performance for demanding tasks like databases, artificial intelligence (AI) model training, and high-traffic web services.

You choose the operating system, fine-tune the kernel, and configure the network exactly to your specifications. This level of control is crucial for security and helps to avoid vendor lock-in, where your applications become so deeply integrated with a specific cloud provider’s proprietary cloud services that migrating away becomes a significant technical and financial hurdle.

Security and Compliance

While public cloud security has improved, the shared responsibility model can create gaps. Data breaches remain a constant threat, and proving compliance in a multi-tenant environment can be complex. Moving workloads to a private cloud infrastructure on bare metal gives you complete control over your security posture, allowing for tailored security measures.

You can implement your own security measures, from dedicated firewalls and intrusion detection systems to customized access controls. This is vital for organizations handling sensitive data or operating in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

Data residency regulations (like GDPR) require data to be stored in specific geographic locations. With a provider like Atlantic.Net, which has data centers across the globe, you can choose the precise location of your bare metal servers, ensuring you meet data residency and sovereignty requirements with strict controls.

The Cloud Repatriation Process

A successful cloud migration back to bare metal requires strategic planning and methodical execution. It’s not always a simple lift-and-shift; but an opportunity to re-architect for better efficiency and performance.

Here’s how an Atlantic.Net customer would approach the repatriation process.

Step 1: Strategic Analysis and Workload Assessment

Before moving anything, you must analyze your existing cloud workloads. Not every application is a good candidate for repatriation. The goal is to identify the workloads that will benefit most from the performance, cost, and control of bare metal.

  • Identify the Pain Points: Which applications are incurring the highest cloud costs? Which ones suffer from inconsistent performance or latency issues?
  • Categorize Your Workloads:
    • Prime Candidates for Repatriation: Stable, predictable workloads with high performance demands (e.g., large databases, analytics platforms, AI workloads).
    • Candidates for a Hybrid Approach: Applications with variable or “burstable” traffic might benefit from staying in the public cloud to handle peaks.
    • Cloud-Native Services: Workloads heavily reliant on proprietary cloud services may present significant hurdles to move and might be better left in place.
  • Consider the Challenges: A balanced assessment must also weigh the downsides. Repatriation introduces new responsibilities, such as increased management overhead for hardware and OS patching. You may lose access to the provider’s managed services, meaning your team is now responsible for tasks like database backups and high availability. Finally, the near-instant scalability of the public cloud is replaced by a model where scaling requires provisioning new physical hardware.
  • Define Success Metrics: Align the move with clear business objectives. Are you aiming to reduce TCO by 30%? Achieve a specific latency target? These goals will guide your entire strategy.

Step 2: Designing Your New Bare Metal Infrastructure

Once you’ve identified which workloads to move, the next step is designing their new environment. This is where partnering with an experienced provider is invaluable. The Atlantic.Net team works with you to architect a solution tailored to your specific needs.

  • Server Sizing: We help you select the right combination of CPU, RAM, and storage (NVMe for performance, HDD for bulk storage) to match your application requirements, ensuring future scalability.
  • Network Architecture: We’ll design a secure and resilient network topology, including private networking between your servers, firewalls, and load balancers to support your mission-critical applications.
  • Data Migration Strategy: We help you plan the most efficient and secure way to conduct the data transfer, whether it’s over a high-speed internet connection or using a physical data import/export service to minimize downtime and data loss.

Step 3: Data Migration and Application Testing

This is the core technical phase of the cloud repatriation. The key is to minimize disruptions to your live servers.

  • Execute the Data Migration: Using the planned strategy, begin the data migration. This often involves an initial bulk transfer followed by ongoing synchronization to keep the source and destination in sync until the final cutover.
  • Refactor and Configure: Applications may need minor adjustments to run on a bare metal OS instead of a hypervisor. This is the time to implement automated configuration management tools (like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef) to build your new environment efficiently and ensure desired state enforcement (ensuring the configuration remains consistent and correct over time).
  • Thorough Testing: Before directing any live traffic, rigorously test everything in the new environment. This includes performance testing, security scanning, and failover testing to ensure everything functions as expected and that you achieve a smooth transition.

Step 4: Cutover, Optimization, and Embracing a Hybrid Future

The final step is the cutover. This is typically done during a planned maintenance window to minimize impact. Once traffic is flowing to your new Atlantic.Net bare metal servers, the job isn’t over.

  • Monitor and Optimize: Continuously monitor your application’s performance and resource utilization. With bare metal, you have the granular management capability to fine-tune the OS and hardware settings to extract every ounce of performance and optimize costs.
  • Embrace the Hybrid Cloud: Cloud repatriation doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. The most effective strategy for many is a hybrid cloud model. Your performance-sensitive databases can run on Atlantic.Net bare metal, while your front-end web servers can auto scale in the Atlantic.Net public cloud. We help you build a hybrid cloud infrastructure, ensuring seamless integration between your public and private clouds for ultimate flexibility.

Choosing the Right Home for Your Workloads

The cloud repatriation trend is a sign of a maturing industry. The initial rush to adopt cloud services is being replaced by a more thoughtful, strategic approach to cloud infrastructure. The question is no longer “Should we be in the cloud?” but “Where should each specific workload run to achieve its objectives?”

For many organizations, especially those with demanding, stable, and data-intensive applications, the answer is increasingly bare metal. Moving from the public cloud offers a clear path to reducing long-term costs, regaining control over your server infrastructure, and building a more resilient, high-performance foundation for your business.

At Atlantic.Net, with 30 years in the industry and a global footprint of data centers, we understand the complexities of infrastructure management. We believe in giving our customers flexible solutions and provide the right tools for the job. If you’re one of the many customers moving workloads and considering strategic cloud repatriation to improve service quality and achieve real cost savings, our experts are here to help you plan and execute a seamless and successful migration.

Want to learn more? Reach out to the experts in the bare metal repatriation process.