[tekacs]

Unless you have a framework sitting over the lot, defining that some set of (service, interface, version) tuples collectively makes up an 'application'.

This way, you get most-every benefit of SOA whilst being able to reason about an application as a whole.

That's the approach we're taking with our microservices framework, wym: http://wym.io/

[beat]

You add a layer of complexity to try to manage the complexity. Which works, but it ain't a free lunch.

[tekacs]

Yes, absolutely. Much in the same way that web frameworks do this. :)

The complexity is handed off to the framework authors/community and (web) development is revolutionised for everyone else.