The last years have shown a lot of interest in container as well as cloud technology. The vast majority of companies building software is at least considering migrating environments to these modern approaches. In all of my recent projects these technologies have been a point of discussion. Especially, introducing container orchestration technologies greatly affects the way how applications are run.

What are the benefits of container technologies? And why should companies care about the cloud? It seems a lot of these concerns are used as buzzwords, as a silver bullet approach. This chapter will examine the motivations behind these technologies. We will also see if and how the Java EE platform is ready for this new world.

This chapter will cover:

• How infrastructure as code supports operations
• Container technologies and orchestration
• Why especially Java EE fits these technologies
• Cloud platforms and their motivations
• 12-factor, cloud native enterprise applications