There are several points to consider when deciding whether microservices or SOA is better for a particular business. SOA is a modular means of breaking up monolithic applications into smaller components, while microservices provides a smaller, more fine-grained approach to accomplishing the same objective.

When should you use SOA?

SOA can be used as a way to hide the implementation details of your subsystems. If your customers need product information, for instance, it's probably a good idea to wrap your product database or inventory subsystem into a generic service and expose only the subset of functionality and data your customers need.

What is the advantage of microservices architecture over SOA?

In microservices, services can operate and be deployed independently of other services, unlike SOA. So, it is easier to deploy new versions of services frequently or scale a service independently. In SOA, ESB could become a single point of failure which impacts the entire application.