Container Hosting and Development Patterns

As we continue to build robust and secure microservices applications, we now shift our attention from securing services to deploying and managing them. In the previous chapter, we examined strategies for protecting our microservice APIs with authentication and authorization mechanisms, rate limiting, and secure communication. These concerns are critical at the network and service boundaries. However, we must now ensure that the services themselves are hosted in environments that promote portability, resilience, and scalability. This is where containerization comes into play.

Modern microservices architectures demand more than traditional hosting methods can easily deliver. Each service may be written in a different language, rely on other runtimes, or require different infrastructure dependencies. Managing these manually across environments often leads to inconsistencies, configuration drift, and deployment friction. Containers solve...