The role of microservices in application architecture is to decompose applications into smaller, loosely coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This architectural style enhances flexibility, allowing teams to work on different components simultaneously using various technologies and languages. Microservices improve maintainability and facilitate continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices, which speed up development cycles. Additionally, because each microservice can be deployed independently, organizations can better manage resource allocation and ensure higher reliability and performance in overall application delivery.