If we take the example of a fictional company called BuyIt
, which deals with an e-commerce Domain, it may make sense to create a different application for each of the different Bounded Contexts solving specific Domain areas.
If some of the different Bounded Contexts are Order Management, Payment Management, Catalog Management, and Inventory Management, we recommend having an application for each one:
Each application exposes any set of delivery mechanisms needed. With the microservices trend, more and more people build Bounded Contexts that end up exposing REST APIs to the outside world. However, a Bounded Context is more than just an API. Remember that an API is just one of many delivery mechanisms; a Bounded Context can provide a web interface to interact with too.