Microservices Architecture (MSA)

Microservices architecture structures an application as a set of small, independently deployable services, each owning its own data and communicating over APIs or events. It enables independent scaling and release at the cost of distributed-systems complexity.

Common patterns include API gateway, service discovery, circuit breaker, saga, CQRS and event sourcing, database per service and the strangler fig for migration. The MSA Patterns page covers them.

They solve different problems. An API gateway manages north-south traffic from clients into the system, while a service mesh manages east-west traffic between services, with security, retries and observability.

Event-driven microservices communicate asynchronously through events and brokers, which reduces coupling and improves resilience. Many microservice systems combine synchronous APIs with asynchronous events.

Both organize functionality as services. SOA typically shares services across the enterprise, often through an ESB, while microservices favor small, autonomous services with decentralized governance and data.

Envoy, Istio and Linkerd for traffic management and service meshes, Dapr as a distributed application runtime, CloudEvents for describing event data, and Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry for telemetry all appear on the CNCF graduated list in November 2026.

When a small team or early product does not yet need independent scaling and deployment. Microservices add network failures, distributed data and operational overhead, so a modular monolith is often a better start. See the Software Architecture Patterns page for how to choose.

Start with the MSA Tutorials and MSA Resources pages, then the Microservices Frameworks pages for your language, and the DevOps Courses and Certifications guide for Kubernetes and CI/CD skills.

When teams and domains are large enough to benefit from independent deployment and scaling. For small systems a modular monolith is often simpler.

microservices.io, Martin Fowler's articles, Sam Newman's book and Microsoft's architecture guide.

This hub links only to pages on this site, so there are no external links to check; each linked page has its own link checks. The page was extended on 11 November 2026 with the Java, TypeScript, messaging, distributed SQL and modernization pages. The CNCF project statuses in this page were checked against the CNCF landscape in November 2026 and change as projects move between maturity levels, so confirm on cncf.io.