For those of us that have been practicing SOA for over a decade, it’s surprising that there’s so much interest in microservices. In fairness microservices don’t look like the vendor play that was early SOA in the early noughties. But experienced SOA practitioners everywhere will be wondering if microservices is actually a good thing. You see microservices is basically an SOA pattern that inherits all the well-known SOA principles and adds characteristics that address the use of SOA for distributed, finer grained software services. And like all patterns, microservices are not applicable to all situations, and it’s very important to understand the cost/benefit equation. Those folks that are heralding microservices as the «new SOA» or «the right way to do SOA» are flat wrong. Microservices is a specialization of SOA that has applicability to a relatively narrow problem space.