First of all, each microservice can be developed independently by a separate team. For instance, building a reservation service can be a full project on its own. The team in charge can make it in whatever programming language and database, as long as it has a well-documented HTTP API.

That also means the evolution of the app is more under control than with monoliths. For example, if the payment system changes its underlying interactions with the bank, the impact is localized inside that service, and the rest of the application stays stable and is probably unaffected.

This loose coupling improves the overall project velocity a lot, as we apply, at the service level, a philosophy similar to the single responsibility principle.

The single responsibility principle was defined by Robert Martin to explain that a class should have only one reason to change; in other words, each class should provide a single, well-defined feature. Applied to microservices, it means that we want to make sure that each microservice focuses on a single role.