A specific business function or activity that the microservice is designed to support. For example, a microservice that handles payments would be designed to support the specific business capability of processing payments. By aligning microservices with business capabilities, it becomes easier to understand the purpose and scope of each microservice and ensure that each microservice is focused on supporting a specific aspect of the business. Additionally, designing microservices based on business capabilities can help ensure that the architecture is aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the organization.

Example

Let’s say we have an e-commerce application. One of the business capabilities in this application could be “order management”.

Order management involves several different processes, such as creating an order, processing payment, updating inventory, and sending a confirmation email. Each of these processes may involve several data entities, such as orders, customers, products, and payments.

Instead of creating a monolithic application that handles all of these processes and entities, we could break them down into separate microservices that are responsible for a specific business capability. For example, we could have a microservice that handles payment processing, another that handles inventory management, and another that sends out confirmation emails.

By separating these capabilities into individual microservices, we can increase the scalability, reliability, and maintainability of the system. Each microservice can be deployed and updated independently, which makes it easier to iterate and improve the application over time. Additionally, we can allocate resources more efficiently, as we can scale up the microservices that are under heavy load and leave the others as they are.

Overall, the microservices architecture allows us to break down complex business logic into smaller, more manageable components that can be developed and maintained independently.