Glossary
An architectural style where an application is built as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific business capability, communicating over well-defined APIs rather than sharing a single codebase or database.
Why It Matters
The alternative — a single monolithic codebase — means every change requires redeploying the entire application, and every team works out of the same code, creating constant merge conflicts and release bottlenecks. Microservices let different parts of a system scale, deploy, and fail independently.
This is part of our Digital Platforms capability — the architecture that lets one platform serve every user type a business has, instead of a separate codebase per department.
See the full Digital Platforms capabilityDoes microservices architecture always mean better performance?
Not automatically — it trades one set of problems (monolith bottlenecks) for another (network calls between services, distributed system complexity). It's the right tool when different parts of a system genuinely need to scale or deploy independently, not a default best practice for every project.
Is this the same as a serverless architecture?
No — serverless is about how code runs (on-demand, without managing servers), while microservices is about how an application is decomposed into independent services. The two are often used together but are separate decisions.