4 reasons why microservices resonate – O’Reilly Radar Quote: "One of the reasons we talk about “microservices” instead of just “services” is the unit of change. Traditional service-oriented architectures are typically designed to maximally leverage shared resources. The side effect of a shared resources design is a lot of physical coupling, where each service shares a monolithic database, an object-relational mapping layer, and lots of shared implementation elements. Architects are also drawn to single sources of truth to eliminate duplication, which encourages “smart” architectural elements like Enterprise Service Buses to handle chores like transformation and orchestration. If you look at SOA architectural goals, the desire is to encapsulate behavior and secondarily share resources. However, traditional SOA architectures make isolated change hard: when everything is highly coupled at the implementation level to share resources effectively, that coupling hinders isolated change. Microservices strive for integration coupling but no physical coupling. The goal is both encapsulated behavior and ease of operational change." (categories: microservicessoaarchitecturedevops )