Cloud Native for Enterprise Systems Is a Scam

Over the past few years, "cloud native" has become the buzzword in enterprise IT circles. Microservices architecture, containerized deployment, K8s orchestration, elastic scaling—these concepts flood technical conferences and cloud vendor marketing materials. Enterprise CTOs, fearing they'll fall behind if they don't ride this wave, rush to invest budgets in architectural transformations.

But let's be clear: most enterprise applications simply don't need cloud native. Those attractive-sounding technical features not only provide no value for internal enterprise systems but actually make development, deployment, and operations far more complex. Cloud-native architecture is designed for consumer-facing applications that must handle massive concurrent loads, while B2B enterprise systems have relatively fixed user bases with entirely different business characteristics. Forcing an architecture designed for enormous traffic onto enterprise systems is a critical technology selection mistake.

Microservices: Trading Service Decomposition for Debugging Nightmares

The core principle of microservices architecture is decomposing monolithic applications into independent services, each capable of being developed and deployed separately. This sounds ideal, but in practice, problems emerge constantly. A complete business process gets split across dozens of microservices, and debugging a single feature requires jumping between multiple services, making issue identification extremely difficult. Network calls between services add latency and failure points, transforming simple function calls into complex RPC communication.

Even worse is the complexity of service governance. Service discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking, distributed tracing—these supporting facilities are all indispensable, each requiring dedicated teams for maintenance. For enterprise systems serving only a few hundred users, the operational costs of this architecture far exceed any benefits. A monolithic application deployed on a single server runs reliably, while a microservices architecture requires maintaining dozens of service instances, multiplying troubleshooting time.

Containerization: Who Is K8s Really For?

Containerization and K8s orchestration form another pillar of cloud native. Cloud vendors claim containers provide environment consistency and K8s offers automated orchestration capabilities. But do internal enterprise systems truly need these? An ERP system or an OA system with a stable user base of a few hundred people can be perfectly served by deployment on a few virtual machines. Introducing a K8s cluster means maintaining Master nodes, Worker nodes, etcd storage, network plugins, storage plugins—an entire complex infrastructure stack.

K8s is designed for large-scale container orchestration, with capabilities intended for millions of concurrent connections and thousands of container instances. Internal enterprise systems with a handful of application instances can be adequately served by traditional VM deployment. Maintaining a K8s cluster requires specialized DevOps engineers, with high learning and operational costs. Even more ironic, many enterprises that adopted K8s discover their cluster resource utilization rarely exceeds 20%, with expensive, complex architectures idle most of the time.

Elastic Scaling: Enterprise Systems Don't Need It

Elastic scaling is cloud native's marquee selling point—automatically adding or removing service instances based on traffic to handle sudden surges. This feature genuinely provides value for scenarios like e-commerce flash sales, social media viral events, or new game server launches. But B2B enterprise systems have relatively fixed user counts—a company's employee headcount doesn't suddenly multiply tenfold in a single day. Enterprise application access patterns follow predictable rhythms, with peaks during business hours and valleys at night, allowing for straightforward capacity planning.

Implementing elastic scaling requires enterprises to maintain complex monitoring and alerting systems, auto-scaling policies, and resource scheduling mechanisms. These systems themselves demand continuous investment, yet the problems they solve simply don't exist in enterprise contexts. More realistically, enterprise system performance bottlenecks typically lie in databases and business logic, not server count. Blindly pursuing elastic scaling means solving a problem that doesn't exist.

The Truth About Cloud Native: Vendor Marketing Rhetoric

Why did the cloud-native technology stack become popular? Because cloud vendors need it to be. For cloud vendors, the more complex the services customers use, the more cloud resources consumed, and the higher the revenue generated. Promoting microservices architecture means customers purchase more VM instances, promoting K8s clusters means customers buy container services and load balancers, promoting elastic scaling means customers pay for peak capacity. Cloud native isn't the inevitable result of technological progress—it's a carefully packaged commercial strategy by cloud vendors.

Consumer-facing applications genuinely need cloud-native architecture because they face massive, unpredictable user traffic. But cloud vendors extend this technical rhetoric to all scenarios, manufacturing anxiety that "not using cloud native means falling behind." Enterprises misled by this marketing invest massive resources in system transformations, only to discover architectural complexity exploding while business agility actually declines. Technology selection that truly serves enterprise interests should be based on actual business needs, not blindly following cloud vendor marketing.

Enterprise Systems Need Simplicity and Reliability

The core requirements of enterprise applications are stability, maintainability, and rapid response to business needs. Cloud-native architecture performs poorly on precisely these dimensions—complex technology stacks reduce stability, distributed systems add failure points, and over-abstracted architectures make business adjustments difficult. What enterprises truly need are simple, direct technical solutions, not over-engineering for engineering's sake.

Modern application platforms already provide solutions better suited to enterprise contexts. JitAi comes with a complete DevOps toolchain, offering one-click deployment and one-click updates without maintaining complex container clusters. The system provides unlimited horizontal scaling capability—when business genuinely requires scaling, simply adding server nodes achieves it through straightforward operations. This architecture ensures system scalability while avoiding cloud-native architecture's excessive complexity, making it the right choice for enterprise systems.