Another word I’ve heard buzzing around lately, microservices works to brings cloud and containers a step further and modularizes the application into smaller function-specific mini applications that work together through APIs. With this approach, the elasticity of the cloud is tuned to the needs of the subscribers, and the business only pays for the network and compute resources they need on a more granular level. The early adopters at this point are the usual suspects: Airbnb, Uber and Netflix.
“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.”