Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture

Chapter 1. The World of Service-Based Architectures

Both microservices architecture and SOA are considered service-based architectures, meaning that they are architecture patterns that place a heavy emphasis on services as the primary architecture component used to implement and perform business and nonbusiness functionality. Although microservices and SOA are very different architecture styles, they share many characteristics.

One thing all service-based architectures have in common is that they are generally distributed architectures, meaning that service components are accessed remotely through some sort of remote-access protocol—for example, Representational State Transfer (REST), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Java Message Service (JMS), Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Remote Method Invocation (RMI), or .NET Remoting. Distributed architectures offer significant advantages over monolithic and layered-based architectures, including better scalability, better decoupling, and better control over development, testing, and deployment. Components within a distributed architecture tend to be more self-contained, allowing for better change control and easier maintenance, which in turn leads to applications that are more robust and more responsive. Distributed architectures also lend themselves to more loosely coupled and modular applications.

In the context of service-based architecture, modularity is the practice of encapsulating ...