Summary is:

You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it

Starting in the cloud makes sense… until it doesn´t:

it’s becoming evident that while cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows. Because this shift happens later in a company’s life, it is difficult to reverse as it’s a result of years of development focused on new features, and not infrastructure optimization. Hence a rewrite or the significant restructuring needed to dramatically improve efficiency can take years, and is often considered a non-starter.

“Repatriation” is hard and distracting:

And all of this requires building expertise beyond one’s core, which is not only distracting, but can itself detract from growth

Those who completed a “repatriation” from the cloud ended up with one-third to one-half the costs.