Microservices Architecture

Microservices split an application into small, independently deployable services that communicate via APIs or messaging. Teams can scale, deploy and change services without coordinating global releases.

When it fits

• Multiple teams need autonomy and separate release cadences
• Different parts of the system have very different scaling profiles

Risks

• Higher operational complexity, networking, tracing and data consistency challenges
• Requires strong platform engineering and observability

Real‑world examples

• Netflix runs hundreds of services backed by tooling for resilience, observability and delivery
• Amazon Retail famously shifted from a monolith to a service‑oriented and then microservices model to scale teams and features

Practical tips

• Start with a well‑factored monolith, then extract services for hot spots
• Invest early in CI/CD, service discovery, tracing and runtime policies