Microservices

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In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. A microservice-based architecture enables teams to develop and deploy their services independently, reduce code interdependency and increase readability and modularity within a codebase. This is achieved by reducing several dependencies in the codebase, allowing developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions, and reducing additional complexity.^[1] Consequently, organizations can develop software with rapid growth and scalability, as well as implement off-the-shelf services more easily. These benefits come with the cost of needing to maintain a decoupled structure within the codebase, which means its initial implementation is more complex than that of a monolithic codebase.^[2] Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as APIs.

A microservice is analogous to a bounded context in domain-driven design.^[3]