From Wikipedia: Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design and software architecture design pattern based on distinct pieces of software providing

From Wikipedia: Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design and software architecture design pattern based on distinct pieces of software providing application functionality as services to other applications. This is known as service-orientation. It is independent of any vendor, product or technology. From article: the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.