Microservices are the result of decomposing applications. That may sound a lot like SOA, but SOA was based on an object-oriented (noun) premise; that is, services were built around an object – like a customer – with all the necessary operations (functions) that go along with it. SOA was also founded on a variety of standards (most of them coming out of OASIS) like SOAP, WSDL, XML and UDDI. Microservices have no standards (at least none deriving from a standards body or organization) and can be based on nouns, like a customer or a product, but just as easily can be based on verbs; that is, functional groups of actions that users take when interacting with an application like “login” or “checkout.”