Well, this can be a fruitless discussion without a shared understanding of what a microservice is.
To Martin Fowler:
> In short, the microservice architectural style [1] is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.
Assembling HR ecosystems from separate apps certainly meets all of the points above.
Ah, this is more what I might call 'macroservices' - API-centric full applications which can be used standalone with their own client interfaces or API-assembled into bigger solutions. I think this should be the default architectural approach and was what Yegge wrote about Bezos mandating at Amazon.
From what I'm seeing, the microservices style is commonly being used for much smaller services a la Unix, typically for reuse across an org. Introduces too many issues around SPOF, orchestration and queuing, versioning, discoverability. I think Lambda is the correct evolution for making that work (if nothing else let AWS figure out stuff like failover, deployment, and the standards for fabric between functions).
To Martin Fowler:
> In short, the microservice architectural style [1] is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.
Assembling HR ecosystems from separate apps certainly meets all of the points above.