This document provides an overview of microservice architecture, including its key characteristics, benefits, problems, and solutions. Microservices are small, independent services that are organized around business capabilities. They communicate through APIs and can be developed and deployed independently. Benefits include scalability, flexibility, and ease of development and testing. Challenges include configuring and monitoring distributed services. Common solutions involve service discovery, load balancing, centralized logging/monitoring, and externalizing configuration. The document also discusses architectural patterns, anti-patterns, and references further resources on microservices.