Microservices set out to do the same thing as Object Oriented programming set out to do. You define an {object,microservice} by exposing methods, and other ser

Microservices set out to do the same thing as Object Oriented programming set out to do. You define an {object,microservice} by exposing methods, and other services and clients interact by calling those methods. Theoretically, if your API remains stable, your internal implementation can change drastically and the system will continue to function as it should. There's no reason you can't draw these boundaries inside a monolith, but with microservices you'd have to go out of your way to not have those boundaries. IMO by using HTTP to communicate, they ended up being significantly closer to the original concepts behind OOP and message passing. http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-... Now, whether microservices are successful in dealing with the problems they set out to solve, and are worth the tradeoffs they entail is still up for debate.