Since a microservice is a small but complete web server, you have to deploy it as a complete server. But since it has a narrow scope of features, it's also simpler to configure. Containers can help you pack your binaries into an image of the operating system with the necessary dependencies to simplify deployment.

This differs from the case with monoliths, in which you have a system administrator who installs and configures the server. Microservices need a new role to carry out this function—DevOps. DevOps is not just a job role, but a whole software engineering culture in which developers become system administrators and vice versa. DevOps engineers are responsible for packing and delivering the software to the end user or market. Unlike system administrators, DevOps engineers work with clouds and clusters and often don't touch any hardware except their own laptop.

DevOps uses a lot of automation and carries the application through various stages of the delivery process: building, testing, packaging, releasing, or deployment, and the monitoring of the working system. This helps to reduce the time it takes both to market a particular software and to release new versions of it. It's impossible to use a lot of automation for monolithic servers, because they are too complex and fragile. Even if you want to pack a monolith to a container, you have to deliver it as a large bundle and run the risk that any part of the application could fail. In this section, we'll have a brief look at containers and continuous integration. We will go into detail about these topics in Chapter 15, Packing Servers to Containers, and Chapter 16, DevOps of Rust Microservices – Continuous Integration and Delivery.