Cloud Exit Cost Checklist

Short Answer

• A lower monthly hosting quote is not the same as lower total cost.
• Price the exit work and the new operating model before moving the workload.
• The cleanest migration candidates are portable, expensive, steady, and not deeply tied to managed provider services.

Costs To Price

• Data export, transfer, replication, and verification.
• Managed service replacements for queues, databases, object storage, identity, secrets, and observability.
• IAM, networking, DNS, TLS, backup, monitoring, and incident response rebuilds.
• Application changes, deployment changes, and new runbooks.
• Performance testing, load testing, rollback window, and downtime risk.
• New provider support, SLA, compliance, and procurement work.
• Training cost for the team that will operate the new placement.

Migration Decision Table

• Migrate: workload is portable, expensive, steady, and savings are repeatable.
• Optimize in place: one or two AWS line items explain the pain.
• Hybrid placement: only GPU, batch, or storage-heavy pieces need to move.
• Do not move yet: workload depends on managed services the team cannot replace safely.
• Revisit later: bill is noisy but not yet understood.

Rough Math

• Monthly savings = current steady-state cost - target steady-state cost.
• Migration cost = engineering time + data movement + testing + downtime risk + new tooling.
• Payback period = migration cost / expected monthly savings.
• Risk-adjusted savings = monthly savings x confidence level.
• If payback is long or confidence is low, optimize in place first.

Questions To Ask Before Leaving

• Which services are truly workload requirements and which are provider conveniences?
• Can the workload run somewhere else without a rewrite?
• What data must move, and how often?
• What breaks if latency or region placement changes?
• Who owns incidents after migration?
• What is the rollback plan if the target placement underperforms?

Red Flags

• The workload depends heavily on provider-specific managed services.
• The team cannot describe the rollback plan.
• The savings estimate ignores engineer time.
• The target quote omits observability, backup, or support.
• The migration is motivated by one unexplained bill spike.

When To Use The Quiz

• Use the RunPlacement quiz when you can describe the workload pattern, data movement, current provider, pain point, and ops tolerance.
• The quiz helps separate full migration from partial re-placement.