We’ve seen monumental changes in personal computing over the past few decades. The more sophisticated a device becomes, the more compact its design and the more advanced its capabilities. Take mobile phones: their first iterations were cumbersome and slow compared to the sleek, fast smartphones we now carry in our pockets. And modern-day laptops are far more refined than their predecessors. Like large, clunky hardware of the past, most applications and digital services have been built as complex monolithic architectures. This means that when one part needs fixing or updating, the whole application must be shut down, causing outages and compromised user experiences. In an effort to modernize application development, developers are now adopting a microservices architecture (MSA). With MSA, the application is a collective of various self-contained functions—like payments and authentication—that work together to deliver a seamless user experience. Developers are able to efficiently focus on one service.