To be honest, I've never really thought of the architectures I work on as being divided along those lines. I think it may be a more important distinction for larger teams. In general I think in terms of separation of duties and authority; my preference is for loose coupling and lazy loading, separate data stores and applets for separate purposes, what might be called microservices; but referring to SOA I really just mean the sharding of different parts of the stack to independent services (several RDSs, S3 buckets, EC2 instances that run cron tasks to sync disparate data systems, beanstalks for some app frontends, etc). I guess some applications within that paradigm are more "micro" than others. Some have custom APIs and others are bound more tightly to central software functions. But perhaps I don't really understand what others are talking about when they stress this distinction.