What are microservices?

Microservices is an architectural style where an application is structured as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each running in its own process and communicating over lightweight mechanisms such as HTTP/REST or message queues. Each service is built around a specific business capability — for example, a user service, an order service, and a payment service — and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This contrasts sharply with a monolith where all functionality lives in a single deployable unit. Teams at companies like Netflix and Amazon popularized microservices to allow hundreds of small teams to ship software independently without coordinating deployments.