In the previous sections, we looked at how Spring evolved to meet the enterprise application needs of the late 2000s—RESTful and SOAP web services and staying ahead of Java EE.

We've evolved further in the last few years and the enterprise needs today are very different from a decade ago. Over a period of time, applications grew into monoliths, which became difficult to manage. The challenges with monolith applications lead to organizations searching for the silver bullet.

In the last few years, a common pattern emerged among all of the organizations that were successful at doing this. From this emerged an architectural style that was called microservices architecture. We will discuss microservices in Chapter 11, Getting Started with Microservices.

Microservices architecture involves building a number of small, independently deployable microservices. These bring in a couple of new challenges:

• How can we quickly build microservices?
• How can we connect the microservice to the cloud?

Let's discuss the solution Spring provides to these problems.