Let's recap what we have done so far. We started by looking at the advantages of building applications based on microservices. Then, we looked at several tools that can help us start building our microservices. We stood with Express and embarked on building a simple microservice.

We learned the basics of state and security by interconnecting our microservice and a database server. We've chosen a test suite and added tests until we had a very good code coverage.

Finally, we learned how to deploy our microservice using containers. We then explored how we could scale our microservice using replicas across different sites.

When we deploy our microservice inside a container, we're opening a new world of possibilities. There are plenty of cloud providers that support containers. This means that as soon as we have our microservice running on a local container, we can replicate and do the same on many of these providers in no time.

You might have found that developing using containers gives you consistent and predictable behavior with the application. This also extends to the operations when they need to deploy.

Containers give them a much simpler and faster method to deploy any application. It's almost like your application is already native to the cloud environment, and they just need to specify a few details and that's it, it's deployed.

In this chapter, to make our microservice cloud-native, we're going to use the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and:

• Create a new project
• Deploy a database service
• Create a Kubernetes cluster
• Create our microservice files on the cluster
• Deploy our microservice to the cluster