KUBERNETES-BASED CLOUD-NATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR IMPROVING SCALABILITY, AVAILABILITY AND OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE IN SAUDI ENTERPRISES

Saudi companies are speeding up their digital transformation but are encountering a real infrastructure issue in that applications need to be able to scale quickly, stay available during changes and outages, and recover without requiring operationally unsustainable complexity. Although Kubernetes offers a programmable control plane for containerised workloads, the platform by itself does not ensure that these goals are met. This study brings together research carried out between 2020 and 2025 on Kubernetes scheduling, autoscaling, resource prediction, high availability, observability, service-mesh resilience, security, chaos engineering, and cloud adoption in Saudi Arabia. Its objective is to find out how these capabilities can be combined to create an enterprise cloud-native operating model which enhances scalability, availability, and operational resilience. Thirty sources, verified by their DOIs, were examined using a structured integrative review procedure and were coded according to technical mechanism, operational outcome, type of evidence, and relevance to Saudi enterprises. The analysis reveals that effective scalability is achieved through multi-signal autoscaling and workload-aware placement rather than relying solely on CPU thresholds; availability is ensured by state-aware recovery, redundancy, disruption control, and deployment safeguards; and resilience is the result of closed-loop observability, tested failure handling, service-level governance, and security measures.