Reflections on SOA and Microservices

Today's Enterprises are facing many challenges in the service oriented, customer experience centric and customer demand driven global environment where ICT is becoming the leading enabler and partner of the modern enterprise. In the last decade, many enterprises have invested heavily in SOA-aligned IT transformations, but not harvested what SOA promised to provide. Now the API and Microservice paradigm has emerged as the "next big thing" for delivering IT outcomes to support the modern enterprise, with many technology vendors and service jumping on the bandwagon. This paper undertakes a critical investigation of the key concepts around SOA, API and Microservices, identifying similarities and differences between them and dispelling the confusion and hype around them. Based on our discussion and analysis, this paper presents a set of recommendations and best practices on the effective use and management of enterprise software components, drawing upon the best of SOA, API and Microservice concepts and practice.