CLOUD COMPUTING ARCHITECTURES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TRADITIONAL ON-PREMISE INFRASTRUCTURE AND MODERN CLOUD-NATIVE PARADIGMS

Abstract

Cloud computing has fundamentally reshaped the design, deployment and operation of information systems. Traditionally, organizations provisioned computing capacity through on-premise infrastructure, purchasing and maintaining physical servers within their own data centres and deploying applications as large monolithic units. This model offers direct control over hardware, predictable performance characteristics and a well-understood security perimeter, but it is constrained by high capital expenditure, slow provisioning cycles, poor elasticity and substantial operational overhead. The emergence of cloud-native paradigms—built upon containerization, orchestration, microservices and serverless execution—has introduced an alternative model characterized by elastic scalability, consumption-based cost, rapid deployment and resilience to individual component failure. This article provides a comparative evaluation of traditional on-premise infrastructure and modern cloud-native architectures, examining their respective cost structures, scalability, operational complexity, security postures and suitability for different classes of workload. The analysis indicates that neither paradigm is universally superior: cloud-native architectures deliver decisive advantages in elasticity and deployment velocity, yet introduce distributed-system complexity, observability challenges and the risk of vendor lock-in, while on-premise infrastructure retains genuine advantages for stable, latency-sensitive or strictly regulated workloads. A hybrid strategy, allocating workloads to the model best suited to their characteristics, represents the most effective approach for contemporary organizations.