[coldtea]

>This kind of thing irks me when I read it. I don't understand why people think of microservices as an architecture pattern. To me they seem more like an implementation detail.

Implementation details and architectural patterns are orthogonal.

Implementation detail means something that is-not/should-not be exposed at higher levels (e.g. API consumers and/or the end user). This includes architecture, but also all kinds of other things (e.g. choice of storage backend).

Microservices is very much an architecture pattern (affecting the whole architecture/design/code-base of the app in the most fundamental way), and is/can-be an implementation detail, as far as API/UI users are concerned.