Chapter 17: Opposite of Cloud-Native Is?

In Chapter 17: Opposite of Cloud-Native Is?, learn why the "lift-and-shift to your own data center" mindset isn’t a valid counterpoint to hyperscale, microservice-heavy "cloud-native" stacks. Instead, this chapter introduces "stack-native": a philosophy centered on running just enough containers (e.g., Flask, NGINX, Granian, and a database) on one well-chosen VM. It avoids vendor lock-in, scales seamlessly for many real-world apps, and remains fully owned by your small team. You’ll see why this approach, replete with Docker orchestration, custom volumes, and self-hosted databases, achieves the reliability of Kubernetes without the complexity or runaway cloud costs.