"Microservice" is just a new name for something that has had many names throughout history. For as long as we've had networks, we've had small, loosely coupled

"Microservice" is just a new name for something that has had many names throughout history. For as long as we've had networks, we've had small, loosely coupled networked apps communicating with each other. We've also had standards for communicating and for discovering nearby services — at one point it was DCE/RPC, later CORBA or DCOM, or Java RMI. Then people started with REST and Thrift, and these days it's more often gRPC and GraphQL. I think the core of the Amazon invention was to mandate that the API be a strict boundary around a service. No cheating by making assumptions about the internals of the implementation. Force teams to work off the published API documentation, and make teams the guardians of each service. Microservices probably aren't developed exactly like that in many companies.