For the last few years, microservices have been gaining popularity as the software architecture pattern of the day. But even as enterprises grapple with how they can undergo “digital transformation,” some startups are looking back to their monolithic roots. Software Engineer Alexandra Noonan topped Hacker News in July with a blog post about Segment’s journey to microservices and back again.

To build and develop an advanced data ecosystem is the dream of any data team, yet that often means understanding how the business will need to store and process that data. As Traveloka’s data engineers, one of our most important obligations is to custom-tailor our data delivery tools for each individual team in our company, so that the business can benefit from the data it generates.

Are they basically just an evolved version of service-oriented architectures (SOA)? Since a microservice must be exposed via an application programming interface (API) for an organization to scale it to new developers, does that mean managing microservices is basically the same as managing APIs? As this article will discuss, the answer to both of these questions is a clear “no” — and companies looking to get the most from their microservices need to understand why.