A defining characteristic of a microservices architecture is that system components and services are organized around business capabilities. Regardless of size, microservices encapsulate a meaningful grouping of functionality and information to allow for the independent delivery of business value. This is in contrast to earlier approaches in service architecture which organized services according to technical characteristics. We've observed a number of organizations who've adopted a layered microservices architecture , which in some ways is a contradiction in terms. These organizations have fallen back to arranging services primarily according to a technical role, for example, experience APIs, process APIs or system APIs. It's too easy for technology teams to be assigned by layer, so delivering any valuable business change requires slow and expensive coordination between multiple teams. We caution against the effects of this layering and recommend arranging services and teams primarily according to business capability.
