Yes, microservices are just a rebranding of a SOA subset. http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html#MicroservicesAndSoa http://martinfowler.com/artic

Yes, microservices are just a rebranding of a SOA subset. http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html#MicroservicesAndSoa http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html#Microser... But I think this direction is inevitable, and we'll soon see freemium microservices. Amazon's "Lambda" page (esp scroll down to the "benefits" https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ ) shows it's more like offloading some tasks (like worker threads in the cloud). I had a play with the second (linked) app, SquirrelBin http://squirrelbin.com/ http://squirrelbin.com/ which can edit and run javascript snippets. The latency is awful, 2-3 seconds for me (I'm in Australia, but that should only add 200ms roundtrip or so). They seem to spin up (reuse?) an entire instance for each request - it's incredible that it's as fast as it is. But the problem is the architecture of this specific app: the delay would be fine if you could edit-run-loop code locally, without the cloud. But they wanted to demonstrate quick development (for them) by just making a CRUD app, using AWS Lambda existing http endpoints for PUT, POST, GET, DEL. So after editing you have to save, load and run - and each one interacts with the cloud. BTW the article about SquirrelBin https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/the-squirrelbin-architecture-a-serverless-microservice-using-aws-lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/the-squirrelbin-archite...