Bounded Context

Coined by Eric Evans in his book Domain-Driven Design. Each service typically owns its own data, meaning that the tables belonging to a particular service are only accessed by that service.

For example, a Wishlist service might own its corresponding wishlist tables. If other services need wish list data, those services would have to ask the Wishlist service for that information rather than accessing the wishlist tables directly.

Within the scope of microservices, Bounded Context means that all of the source code representing some domain or subdomain (such as a wish list for a customer), along with the corresponding data structures and data, are all encapsulated as one unit.