When Native Compilation Meets Cloud Reality: The 1.7 to 9 Second Discrepancy

While GraalVM and Spring Boot Native promise sub-second startup times, real-world cloud deployments often face infrastructure-level bottlenecks that eliminate these gains—revealing that local performance optimizations don't automatically translate to production environments. This investigation challenges the assumption that code-level native compilation alone justifies the complexity trade-offs, particularly for scale-to-zero architectures. Developers must account for network latency, resource constraints, and environment-specific factors beyond optimization to achieve actual deployment performance gains.