In the cloud-native space, microservice architectures and containers are reshaping the way that enterprises build and deploy applications. They function, in a word, differently than traditional monolithic applications.
Microservices are far more distributed and dynamic than their traditional counterparts. A single application might have tens or hundreds of microservices, leading potentially to thousands of separate OS-level processes, each with its own API, deployed across multiple data centers all over the world, and spun up and down dynamically. These architectural differences from monolithic applications cause challenges for developers, operations, and security alike.
