DevOps Dictionary

Microservices are an architectural approach where an application is composed of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific business capability and communicating through APIs (clear, versioned interfaces). They address the pain of large, tightly coupled codebases by letting teams change, ship, and scale parts of the system without coordinating a full application release. At a high level, each service runs as its own process or container, owns its runtime and often its data, and is operated with automation for deployment, monitoring, and recovery to handle failures across network boundaries.

With microservices, you can release more frequently, scale only the components under load, and contain many failures to a single service; without them, a monolithic application can be simpler early on but tends to make deployments riskier and scaling more costly as the system grows. This gap exists because distributed systems introduce latency, partial failures, and operational overhead that must be managed through strong service contracts and disciplined DevOps practices.