Cloud and Containers as the self-service infrastructure for microservices

The main driver for cloud is to improve agility and reduce cost. By reducing the time to provision the infrastructure, the speed of delivery can be increased. By optimally utilizing the infrastructure, one can bring down the cost. Therefore, cloud directly helps you achieve both speed of delivery and cost.

Without having a cloud infrastructure with the cluster management software, it would be hard to control the infrastructure cost when deploying microservices. Hence, the cloud with self-service capabilities is essential for microservices to achieve their full potential benefits. In a microservices context, the cloud not only helps you abstract the physical infrastructure, but also provides software APIs for dynamic provisioning and automatic deployments. This is referred to as infrastructure as code or software defined infrastructure.

Containers further provide benefits when dealing with DevOps and microservices. They provide better manageability and a cost-effective way of handling large volumes of deployments. Furthermore, container services and container orchestration tools helped you manage infrastructures.