Over the past decade, the public cloud became the default way to run software. Its flexibility, on-demand pricing, and global reach made it the obvious choice for many teams. Startups could move fast, and enterprises could avoid long procurement cycles and complex hardware management.

As teams gain more experience with cloud infrastructure, unintended consequences start to rear their costly heads. Bills grow quickly and are difficult to predict. Managing cloud-native tooling takes more time than expected. And what began as a move toward simplicity often turns into a sprawl of services, dependencies, and layers.

In response, some companies are rethinking where and how their workloads should run. Not everything needs to live in someone else's cloud. This is most apparaent when cost, performance, or compliance is a priority. Instead of relying entirely on public providers, some teams are beginning to bring parts of their cloud back in-house.

Building a private cloud, whether its composed of strictly on-prem servers or a mix of on-prem, colo, bare metal cloud, and hyperscalar, is now a completely different process. Platforms like Cycle make sure you don't get lost in the unforgiving weeds of configuration and offer a golden road to creating a cloud that makes sense for your organization.

This post will explore why the private cloud shift is taking such a strong hold, what modern tooling provides us, and why many organizations are choosing Cycle as their platform for building a private cloud in this new modern way.

What's Driving the Shift?

When companies first moved to the public cloud, it felt like an obvious choice. It allowed teams to launch quickly, skip infrastructure procurement, and focus on delivering software. But over time, cracks began to show for organizations managing large, persistent workloads.

One of the clearest issues is cost. Cloud pricing can be difficult to forecast, particularly when workloads grow or become less elastic. That might sound like a really strange statement. Cloud pricing should become more stable for long lived services, right? If you're talking just compute, then maybe, but tracking spend in the cloud is difficult when there are so many pieces: New logging and monitoring agents applied Background data syncs and telemetry implications Storage usage sprawl Redundancy and backups for resiliency that might not ever get used

These addons can quickly ratchet up baseline cost!

In Flexera's 2024 report , managing cloud spend was the top challenge for teams, ahead of security and governance. A report from CloudZero found that only 30% of teams felt confident they understood where their cloud costs were coming from.

Alongside cost, complexity has crept in. Teams are managing multiple environments, stitching together service layers, and trying to keep up with tools that are constantly changing. Control is part of the equation too. Teams are placing more importance on where workloads live, how traffic moves between systems, and where data is stored. This becomes especially relevant in regulated industries or where latency is a concern.

This isn't a rejection of the cloud, but it does seem to signal a more balanced approach being favored by the many. In fact, organizations are asking: what needs to run in a managed service, and what makes more sense to run on infrastructure we control?

Private Cloud in 2025

The phrase private cloud still carries baggage. For many, it brings to mind older setups: enterprise virtualization stacks, internal data centers full of brittle custom scripts, or large-scale platforms that required dedicated teams just to stay online. That version of private cloud was expensive, complex, and hard to adapt.

But that model is fading. In 2025, the definition has started to shift. Private cloud no longer means building and maintaining everything internally. Instead, it refers to infrastructure that is run under your policies, deployed in locations you choose, and operated with the same ease and automation that the public cloud promised. The delivery model feels like cloud, but the ownership is yours.

According to the 2024 CNCF Annual Survey , more than 36% of organizations reported using on-prem infrastructure as part of their workloads, often in combination with public providers like AWS and GCP.

It would seem that to these organizations, what matters is not where the infrastructure is hosted, but whether teams can control how it's orchestrated, secured, and scaled.

Tools have evolved to meet this need. Platforms like Cycle are designed to treat raw compute, whether it comes from a bare metal server, a cloud VM, or at the edge, as part of one cohesive system.

With Cycle powering this orchestration, teams can build private clouds that:

• Span environments
• Integrate with public providers and hyperscalars
• Delivers consistent operational standards in every location
• Give operational flexibility of where to run their workloads
• Reduce operational lift

Private cloud on Cycle is a move toward consistency, control, and simplicity without taking on the full burden of legacy infrastructure management.

Why Bare Metal Is Back in the Conversation

For a long time, bare metal was seen as a more difficult approach to infrastructure that required careful planning, capital investment up front, and a workforce with deep domain expertise. Many teams moved away from it to avoid dealing with hardware directly. It seemed slower to deploy, harder to automate, and less scalable than cloud environments. The thought was, relying on a public provider would make it easier to get started and stay focused on building software.

That perception is changing. As organizations spend more time with cloud-based infrastructure, they're discovering that bare metal offers some useful advantages.

Performance

Without a hypervisor or shared resource layer, performance tends to be more consistent. Teams gain clearer insight into how systems behave under load, which matters for workloads that run steadily over long periods. Dedicated hardware reduces noisy neighbor effects and provides more predictable latency, which can be critical for certain applications.

Cost Predictability

A 2024 report from Civo found that 69% of companies had been surprised by their cloud bills in the previous year. Much of that came from workloads that didn't benefit from elasticity or autoscaling. In those cases, teams realized they could have spent less by running on dedicated hardware instead

Operational Simplicity

Platforms like Cycle allow bare metal to be treated just like any other compute environment. Servers can be provisioned and monitored through the same workflows used for cloud compute and the update process is automatic. That integration makes bare metal a first-class citizen in the infrastructure stack, not a separate track requiring custom tooling. Bare metal is becoming a practical choice again, not because the industry is retreating to older models, but because modern tooling has finally made it accessible.

Unifying Private Cloud without Complexity

Many teams today are already testing and deploying workloads across multiple different compute clusters. A service might start in the public cloud, then expand to colocated hardware for cost savings, or move to edge devices to meet latency requirements. These decisions often happen incrementally, with each new service incrementally improved and moved in response to a specific need. Over time, this creates a mix of providers, locations, and tooling that can be difficult to manage as one system.

Fragmentation leads to higher operating cost. Engineering teams are left maintaining multiple deployment pipelines, coordinating updates across platforms, and juggling different security models. According to HashiCorp's 2023 State of Cloud Strategy report , 94% of organizations reported using a multi-cloud strategy, but nearly half cited increased complexity as the top challenge it introduced.

This is where newer platforms are starting to shift expectations. With the right orchestration layer, infrastructure no longer needs to be managed in silos. Teams can deploy applications across cloud regions, private datacenters, and remote edge devices using a single workflow. Networking, updates, and service discovery can be handled consistently, regardless of where the underlying compute runs.

Cycle is one example of how this model works in practice. It allows teams to bring together raw compute from cloud providers, on-prem servers, and edge environments into a new private cloud, managed through a unified control plane. With built-in automation, encrypted networking, and support for both containers and virtual machines, Cycle helps reduce the coordination overhead that normally comes with hybrid setups.

Is Ownership the New Standard?

The public cloud isn't going away. It still offers clear advantages for many workloads and use cases. But as organizations grow and their infrastructure matures, the tradeoffs become harder to ignore. Costs are higher than expected, complexity keeps rising, and the ability to control where and how software runs has started to matter more.

Private cloud is making an undeniable return as a clearer view of what teams want to own and what they are willing to rent. When it's built with modern tooling, private cloud can offer the speed of public infrastructure with the visibility and predictability teams need to operate with confidence.

Cycle was built for this shift. It helps teams reclaim control over their infrastructure without giving up the ease and automation they've come to expect from the cloud. Whether you're running on bare metal, in a colocated rack, or across multiple regions, Cycle brings it all under one system. If you're exploring a modern approach to private cloud, take a closer look at how Cycle works .