"Also, there is the midpoint between monolith and micro service, and this is called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), you could have:

  - a DAL (Data Abstraction Layer) service
  - a Business Logic service (talking to the DAL)
  - an API (talking to the Business Logic service)
  - a Frontend (talking to the API)"

For me what you describled is just a common monolith.

I've been developing for 8+ years and have seen this model at every company where I've worked. I really thought this was just the "standard" way that everybody used to develop. I've also worked on a couple of CQRS architectures but the "layering" is still very similar to what you described.

I'm curious now, how do other monolith architectures look like if not like this?