Microservices are a software development technique - a variant of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) structural style - that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled services
Microservices - also known as the microservice architecture - is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are
The microservice architecture enables the rapid, frequent and reliable delivery of large, complex applications. It also enables an organization to evolve its technology stack.
Source: microservices.io
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. 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. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as APIs.
A microservice is analogous to a bounded context in domain-driven design.