The idea of distributed, componentized applications goes back a long way. Most notoriously, it emerged in the form of the SOA (service-oriented architecture) trend that peaked eight yeas ago. Now, it's back -- as microservices architecture.
Microservices architecture and SOA aren't the same. But the high-level idea stems from the same frustration with monolithic applications, as Martin Fowler explains in a post much more comprehensive than this one. Create your application as a suite of services instead of one tightly coupled monolith of code, and it's easier to change and maintain -- particularly an Internet application that's supposed to be running 24/7. Just refactor and redeploy a couple of services rather than rejiggering and re-releasing the monolith.
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