Microservices may be used as an architectural pattern on their own. However, they are often combined with other architectural choices, such as cloud-native computing, serverless applications, and mostly with lightweight application containers.
Service-oriented architectures bring loose coupling and high cohesion. Microservices can do it too, when applied correctly. However, it can be somewhat challenging because it requires good intuition to partition the system into the usually vast amount of microservices.
There are more similarities between microservices and their bigger cousins as they, too, can have SOAP-, REST-, or gRPC-based messaging and use technologies such as message queues for being event-driven. They also have well-known patterns to help with achieving the required quality attributes, such as fault tolerance (for example, through the isolation of faulty components), but in order to have an efficient architecture, you must decide...
