There is a lot of published opinion on microservices versus SOA. I think most of these discussions miss the point. Here is an analogy to help explain why.
Shipping containers have revolutionized global trade. If you tried to understand shipping containers by just looking at what they are—metal boxes into which goods are packed—you would probably be mystified. You only start to understand shipping containers when you see them stacked onto ships, loaded and unloaded at major ports around the world, transferred to trucks for final distribution and so on. When you see those processes in action, you start to understand why a simple metal box of a standard size can have a major impact on the speed, efficiency and security of global trade.
Comparing microservices to SOA is like comparing a shipping container to open-hold ships without considering how they are used. To understand how microservices are used, you should look at the custom-built platforms for micro-services, like Kubernetes, Netflix OSS and mesos/marathon. If you like, these are the container ports for application code. If you understand what these platforms do and how they do it, you will have really understood microservices. If you try to understand microservices by just looking at the microservices themselves, you risk missing the point. I wrote a blog post on this topic and would appreciate your feedback. What do you think?
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