Late in 2013, hearing all the discussion in my circles about microservices, I became concerned that there was no clear definition of microservices (a fate that caused many problems for SOA). So I got together with my colleague James Lewis, who was one of the more experienced practitioners of this style. Together we wrote

We wrote the article to provide a firm definition for the microservices style, which we did by listing the common characteristics of microservice architectures that we saw in the field.

Componentization via Services

Organized around Business Capabilities

Products not Projects

Smart endpoints and dumb pipes

Decentralized Governance

Decentralized Data Management

Infrastructure Automation

Design for failure

Evolutionary Design

We also looked at common questions such as "how big is a microservice" and "what's the difference between microservices and Service-Oriented Architecture". The article catalyzed interest in microservices.