The high-level structure of a software system — the decisions about how components are organised, how they communicate, and how data flows between them. Like the blueprint of a building before construction starts.
A microservices software architecture breaks an application into small independent services (payments, users, inventory) that each run and scale independently.
Software architecture is a design discipline, not a single cloud service. All major clouds provide building blocks (compute, networking, data, messaging, identity, observability) used to implement architectures such as microservices, event-driven, or layered systems.