microservice
termcloudprogramming
An architecture that splits an application into independently deployable services communicating over the network.
The promised benefit is organisational before it is technical: teams can ship without coordinating a single release. The cost is that every function call that crossed a process boundary now crosses a network, so failures that were impossible become routine - partial success, timeout, retry storms, and version skew between services that used to be compiled together. That is why tracing, idempotence and backpressure stop being optional, and why splitting a system that one team ships once a week usually buys the costs without the benefit.
Also known as: microservices