In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method for use with a cloud computing environment, for creating or updating tenant artifacts using microservices. A multi-tenant cloud service provides a loosely-coupled and distributed approach for consistently creating or updating tenant artifacts through the use of multiple independent microservice's lifecycle containers, each having their own requirements during the creation or update of a tenant instance. The development and packaging of lifecycle containers is simplified by managing the software code responsible for artifact creation or update within a microservice code repository. The system can use a deployment approach of loosely-coupled microservice lifecycle containers together with an infrastructure lifecycle service that coordinates tenant artifact creation/update across multiple microservices.