The Azure Bill That Ended Cloud

What if the real problem isn’t Azure… it’s putting the wrong workloads there?

In this episode, Max Clark sits down with William Sellers, Solutions Architect at DartPoints, to dissect a real-world migration from the energy sector: an internal research app that went into Azure “to move fast,” scaled to nearly $30K/month, and finally forced leadership to draw a line.

You’ll hear how technical debt, predictable workloads, and opaque vCPU economics quietly turned a good idea into an unsustainable cloud bill—and what it actually took to unwind it.

They break down:

• Why predictable, IaaS-style workloads get financially punished in hyperscale cloud
• How finance, infrastructure, and application owners finally aligned around leaving Azure
• The real definition of “minimal downtime” when you’re moving a 100+ TB VM and a Zerto bug derails your plan
• How DartPoints used private cloud to stabilize costs, simplify billing, and reduce complexity
• What VMware/Broadcom uncertainty really means for platform decisions—and why many teams now say, “we don’t care about the hypervisor; just make the VMs run.”

If you’re responsible for infrastructure spend and you haven’t evaluated whether your workloads belong in Azure, you’re already behind.This episode gives you the decision framework, the warning signs, and the migration realities—so you don’t end up defending a runaway cloud bill with no exit plan.