Microservice architecture (MSA) is an approach to building software systems that decomposes business domain models into smaller, consistent, bounded-contexts implemented by services. These services are isolated and autonomous yet communicate to provide some piece of business functionality. Microservices are typically implemented and operated by small teams with enough autonomy that each team and service can change its internal implementation details (including replacing it outright!) with minimal impact across the rest of the system.

Representational state transfer (REST) or RESTful web services is a way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. REST-compliant Web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other forms of Web service exist, which expose their own arbitrary sets of operations such as WSDL and SOAP.