What are Microservices?

Microservices are an architectural style in which an application is built as a set of small, independently deployable services that communicate through well-defined APIs. Each service owns a focused capability such as catalog, cart, pricing, or search, and can be developed, scaled, and updated on its own schedule.

Definition

A microservice typically owns its data, exposes its functionality through HTTP, gRPC, or messaging, and is operated by a small team. Service boundaries are drawn around business capabilities, so the architecture stays aligned with how the company is organized. In commerce, common service boundaries include product, inventory, order, payment, customer, and content.

Why it matters

Microservices enable parallel work across teams, targeted scaling of hot paths, and the freedom to choose appropriate technologies per service. They are a natural fit for composable commerce, where best-of-breed services from different vendors are combined into one solution. The trade-off is operational complexity: more services mean more deployments, more network calls, and more observability work.

Trade-offs

Microservices do not solve organizational problems. Without clear ownership, contract discipline, and good observability, a microservice architecture becomes harder to operate than a monolith. Successful adoption usually pairs the architecture with platform engineering, standardized deployment pipelines, and consistent API contracts to keep the cost of change low.

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