While applications can run anywhere, working in different environments has traditionally led to issues in terms of general consistency. Deploying code from one environment to another falls foul of a change that renders it incompatible with the underlying infrastructure. The industry's focus on moving away from a monolithic application to small, integrated components (that is, microservices) has, in general, led to the consideration of generating loosely coupled artifacts.
Traditional development in an environment based on virtualized hardware provides a well-understood platform on which many successful deployments exist. However, the inefficiency of deploying microservice components has meant this approach has become less attractive due to the unnecessary replication of underlying resources:
In the preceding diagram, you can see that, with the virtualized...
