If you have been in application development for a while now, the recent rise of microservices sounds a lot like an approach you may already know — service oriented architecture (SOA). Both architectures are focused on breaking up large monolithic applications into collections of smaller independent services, and both promise to simplify development.
While the vision and promise of microservices and SOA are shared, the execution differs widely. But exactly what sets them apart? More importantly, are microservices really “SOA done right,” as everyone says? The answer is not as straightforward as you might think.
Download the exclusive Microservices vs. SOA report from O’Reilly Media for a thoughtful breakdown of the two architectures. In this report, author Mark Richards compares both architectures and discusses where one approach might be preferred over the other. In practice, application developers rarely follow a single paradigm strictly, but instead choose the parts of various approaches that best suit their needs as they create a particular application. It’s no different with microservices and SOA. We hope the report increases your understanding of both architectures, giving you the knowledge necessary to make the right decisions for your application.