Design your workload service architecture

Build highly scalable and reliable workloads using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) or a microservices architecture. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the practice of making software components reusable via service interfaces. Microservices architecture goes further to make components smaller and simpler.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces use common communication standards so that they can be rapidly incorporated into new workloads. SOA replaced the practice of building monolith architectures, which consisted of interdependent, indivisible units.

At AWS, we have always used SOA, but have now embraced building our systems using microservices. While microservices have several attractive qualities, the most important benefit for availability is that microservices are smaller and simpler. They allow you to differentiate the availability required of different services, and thereby focus investments more specifically to the microservices that have the greatest availability needs. For example, to deliver product information pages on Amazon.com (“detail pages”), hundreds of microservices are invoked to build discrete portions of the page. While there are a few services that must be available to provide the price and the product details, the vast majority of content on the page can simply be excluded if the service isn’t available. Even such things as photos and reviews are not required to provide an experience where a customer can buy a product.