The document discusses building applications in modern cloud environments. It outlines four main approaches: buying commercial off-the-shelf software, building with traditional architectures/methods, modernizing existing applications to be "cloud ready", and building cloud native/microservice applications. It then discusses the benefits of containers over virtual machines for building distributed applications at scale in the cloud. Finally, it presents Mantl as an open source platform that provides all the components needed for a microservices architecture on top of infrastructure-as-a-service.