I was wondering about the name change from SOA to Microservices myself. I think both monolith and microservice architectures are valid, it just requires softwa

I was wondering about the name change from SOA to Microservices myself. I think both monolith and microservice architectures are valid, it just requires software architects to think a bit more about the size of the problem. If you just have a slow growing self-contained app, then monolith is probably the way to go. If you have an app that has the potential to grow quickly, or is already integrating with multiple external services, it may make sense to look at microservices. We switched from monolith to SOA a couple of years ago, and it's been a net win in terms of price, reliability of site performance, and ease of development. There were the obvious drawbacks you stated above of network timeouts, lag, and async issues, but it's just a different set of problems.