Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture

Preface

In the mid-2000’s, service-oriented architecture (SOA) took the IT industry by storm. Numerous companies adopted this new architecture style as a way to bring better business functionality reuse into the organization and to enable the IT organization and the business to better communicate and collaborate with each other. Dozens of best practices for implementing SOA emerged at that time, as well as a plethora of third-party products to help companies implement SOA. Unfortunately, companies learned the hard way that SOA was a big, expensive, complicated architecture style that took too long to design and implement, resulting in failed projects that drove SOA out of favor in the industry.

Today, microservices architecture is taking the IT industry by storm as the go-to style for developing highly scalable and modular applications. Microservices architecture holds the promise of being able to address some of the problems associated with large, complex SOAs as well as the problems found with big, bloated monolithic applications. But how much do microservices and SOA differ? Is the industry destined to repeat the same experience with microservices as with SOA?

In this report I walk you through a detailed comparison of the microservices and SOA architecture patterns. You will learn the basics of each of these architectures and core differences between them in terms of the architecture style, architecture characteristics, service characteristics, and capabilities. By using the information in this report, you will know how these two architecture styles differ from each other and which of the two is best suited for your particular situation.