This is a good place to start: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html The opening sentence

This is a good place to start: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html The opening sentence sets the tone well for the article well: "'Microservices' - yet another new term on the crowded streets of software architecture." A colleague of mine once said that his work (he was a business strategist) was "slowly coming into focus." We're pretty far along today in our understanding of microservices, but at the time the article was written (early 2014) microservices were "slowly coming into focus". Reading what people where thinking when the industry was trying to define them should help in understanding what they are today.