Okay right but why would “cloud native” as the community’s marketing for it be considered a red flag. Someone who doesn’t know better would think oh “cloud native” Kubernetes is evil. When really the moniker mostly means it was designed to be highly scalable, to interface with public cloud API’s, among many other decisions that differentiate traditional enterprise I.T. software (which like Cisco products) could have its own fair share of “evilness” to be avoided.

My point was that O.P. should clarify why that’s such an immediate red flag for them.

To future readers I consistently use “cloud native” software on my bare metal computers at home. It’s mostly a marketing term to reflect “modern ness” in software features to be run on a public cloud.

In my experience cloud native doesn’t mean it’s on Google, or Microsoft’s privacy stealing software because they’re marketing to you that you can host it yourself on the public cloud.