In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application into a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services that communicate through lightweight protocols. This pattern allows teams to develop, deploy, and scale services independently, improving modularity, scalability, and adaptability. However, it introduces additional complexity, particularly in managing distributed systems and inter-service communication, making the initial implementation more challenging compared to a monolithic architecture. Source: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices