Enterprise scope vs Application Scope (SOA vs Microservices)

Question

I am trying to understand the difference of SOA and microservices archtitecture and some terms are so abstract to me, so it is hard for me to understand.

I read documents, generally mentioning about;

• Soa is enterprise scope
• Microservice is application scope

I can not understand this concepts, what is the difference of enterrise scope and application scope?

is that when dividing applications into multi services ? in both architectures applications are divided into multiple services and pieces are communicating by similar technology. if difference is about how to divide application into multiple services and in soa it should be divided by busineess concepts, I dont think that there is rule in microservices architecture about not dividing by business concepts about the size of each service.

another abstract thing that I met: This integration must occur by using service interfaces in soa- that's why it is Service-oriented.

what does that mean ? and how it is different from microservices integration?

Thanks for any ideas,answers

Answer 1

It's been a long since the question was asked so not sure if the insights below are relevant to you anymore.

Enterprise scope with respect to SOA usually refers to Service enablement of existing applications in an enterprise and unlocking their potential/investment while creating an overarching Business Process. SOA is very tightly bonded to the Business process and in simple terms can be assumed to be the actual implementation of an end-to-end process such as Sales Order Processing, Loan Application approval. Keep in mind that to create such a process, the SOA process/application would need to integrate with heterogeneous applications/systems/databases such as ERP, CRM, RDBMS, File systems, etc. In that sense, SOA architecture is not a pure app development architecture. Another aspect of SOA that you already mentioned is Service interfaces which can range from SOAP, JMS, and all other kinds of protocols

Microservices on the other hand are more aligned towards hardcore application development and breaking applications into granular and independent components (many times, even written in different programming languages). But most often the primary integration mechanism is lightweight REST API between the microservices.

Hope it helps.