[tannhaeuser]

Sorry for nitpicking, but I think the central value proposition of microservices/SOA is that you communicate with you backend via well-defined network protocols rather than eg. procedure calls so that the client and server technology stack doesn't matter.

Containers have nothing to do with it.

[oreganoz]

I'm just mentioning that containers may make implementing & deploying microservices easier and thus a more popular solution.

[amirouche]

How a network protocol is more specified that a procedure call?

[tannhaeuser]

It's not. The benefit is that

- you can keep a service running long after the project that created it has disbanded and/or the runtime and build environment is deprecated on a given O/S

- you don't necessarily need to deep-dive into the business logic of legacy services

- you can replace a service implementation with another one running on another stack without having to adapt service clients

- you can change auth mechanism outside of the service implementations

- you can scale out (CPU-bound) services onto multiple hosts

Mind you, these benefits are not achieved by using microservices/SOA in itself; the contribution of microservices/SOA, however, is that these design goals aren't impossible to achieve because of architected reasons.