As we said, a microservice focuses on solving a problem and solving it right, much like the UNIX philosophy of make each program do one thing well [Doug McIlroy].

That said, too many people describe microservices as being less than a certain number of lines of code, or less than a certain number of megabytes in total size. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, microservices are more closely tied to bounded contexts as defined by Eric Evans in Domain Driven Design, a worthwhile read despite having been written in 2003.

In essence, a microservice should focus on solving a particular problem, and only use enough domain knowledge to tackle that specific problem. If other parts of the system wish to interact with the same domain, their own context might be different.

Suffice it to say, entire books have been written on the subject of microservices, so, to further explore this realm, feel free to look about. For the rest of this chapter, we'll see how Spring Boot and Spring Cloud make it super simple to engage in microservice development without paying a huge cost.