Microservices, for the uninitiated, are essentially the decomposition of applications into multiple services. This decomposition is often based on functional lines, with related functions being grouped together into a service. While this may sound a like SOA, it really isn’t, especially given that SOA was an object-centered methodology that focused on creating services around «nouns» like customer and product. Microservices, while certainly capable of being noun-based, are just as likely to be verb-based, that is to say, based on a functional grouping like «login» or «checkout.» SOA was essentially an extension of object-oriented design while microservices are more about decomposition for purposes of rapid (agile) development with the bonus of having significant scalability advantages over object-oriented architectures.