We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
> <i>"Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS"</i><p>Nonsense. There were plenty of SaaS startups. There was even a little event called the dotcom boom all about internet companies. This lack of history and experience is why new companies get into this cloud-first mess in the first place.<p>Cloud is primarily for flexibility in iteration, dynamic scaling, or complex configurations that would be otherwise hard to do. If you have steady-state load like this then a few servers in your colo is pretty simple and far cheaper.<p>Companies also vastly overestimate their scale when their entire business could probably fit on a single commodity server.