Public cloud spending tilts heavily toward SaaS—nearly 40% of total expenditure. This isn't a win. It's a symptom of slow internal development. Enterprises pay for generic SaaS seats because they can't build custom applications fast enough. Competitive advantage doesn't come from renting software. It comes from owning your intelligent core. If your roadmap depends entirely on third-party integrations, you're building dependencies, not defensibility. Organizations need to shift from SaaS aggregators to cloud-native builders. The Distributed Systems Tax Microservices enable independent scaling, but they carry overhead: service discovery, network latency, observability. This "distributed systems tax" can outweigh the benefits for mid-sized teams. Build microservices to solve deployment contention, not to chase modularity. If teams aren't blocking each other's releases, a modular monolith works better. Cloud-native means autonomous release pipeline...