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Service-oriented architectures, commonly called SOA, can be robust and complex—depending on their features—and are not always the best option for all types of software applications.

That’s why microservices are fundamental in the context of software architecture: by decomposing an application into smaller services, microservices can make protocols lighter and services more focused, improving usability and making the final product easier to understand.

The big benefit, of course, is developing and testing more easily, reducing app execution time and allowing the team to implement improvements that scale services independently. Other direct benefits of microservices include the possibility of continuous refactoring, even on individual services, and continuous deployments across multiple architectures.

In short, microservices take large, complex, long-lived architectures and break them into smaller, understandable, scalable service components.

Why are microservices important today?

In the world of corporate applications, we see a variety of methodologies used to ensure development, testing, and deployment happen in a structured, effective way. When applications are simple, their architecture is also relatively simple to structure and manage.

But when applications are large and complex, working in a “macro analysis” mode—rather than breaking the work into microservices—can compromise delivery and limit the adoption of new technologies during app construction.

That’s where the importance of microservices architecture comes in: by splitting an application into smaller service sets, teams gain more control over development progress and start understanding, more holistically, where stages can be improved. This makes it easier to adopt frameworks, technologies, and methods one service at a time—not across the entire system at once.

On the other hand, because microservices require high levels of automation, they also demand care when defining the elements of complex applications, since those elements can create issues during the process. Still, that doesn’t make microservices inappropriate for complex applications.

How to prepare a software architecture for microservices

There are many ways to prepare software architecture for microservices. The right answer depends on the size of your application and what you want to achieve. But in general, they all share a common foundation: creating mechanisms that integrate services by implementing new functionality.

Before starting the migration, developers should identify all architectural elements to refactor them into services—improving cadence between stages and removing weight from the final product.

Deciding the best way to split a software architecture into services is up to the engineering team, which can define services by verbs, use cases, synonyms, resources, or boundaries.

The key is to keep in mind that each service in a microservices structure should have few responsibilities, so refactoring becomes an ally rather than an obstacle. One way to approach the architecture to achieve this is class modeling based on the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), where each class should have only one reason to change.

Depending on your application, it’s possible to define microservices through its features—as long as each executes only one thing—unless the service’s role is to compose with other parts to execute complex tasks.

Either way, one thing is clear: the more robust an application is, the more likely it is to have functional issues or take a long time to complete—unless, of course, you bet on microservices.