What are microservices? 

Rather than being locked into a single language or technology stack, developers have the freedom to select the best solutions, tools or resources for each individual function—without having to worry about communication between services being affected.

Because microservice-based applications are highly modular, they can be developed and deployed with relative ease. Teams can coordinate together to work concurrently on individual, small components, and each component can be deployed independently.

In traditional application architecture, meeting changing demand often means scaling the entire application. Microservices allow developers to redirect resources towards scaling only the applicable services and components, improving scaling speeds while reducing associated costs.

In the event that one microservice fails, neighbouring microservices remain unaffected. This means that microservice-based applications do not tend to crash; if one or more components fails, the application itself will continue to operate at reduced functionality until the affected service can be repaired.

Because each service is self-contained and designed to independently perform a specific function, developers can reuse and recycle services for use across a number of different applications. Components can function as ‘building blocks,’ significantly reducing the need to create new code from scratch for every new project.

Improved agility, increased reusability and simplified deployment all promote shorter development cycles and faster time to market. This has the potential to improve business returns and deliver a more-satisfying user experience.

The advantages represented by microservices also carry with them certain difficulties. Here, we take a closer look at some of the challenges organisations may encounter when implementing a microservices approach:

Making the switch to microservices means identifying and cataloguing any and all dependencies between services. Due to dependencies, completing a single build may directly lead to having to implement a number of other builds, which can be frustrating and time consuming.

A key factor in microservices is that each component has its own, isolated database. But with each new database comes increased complexity in management. The more services, and the more databases, being employed, the less convenient it is to manage the data itself.

When updating applications to new versions using microservices, there is a chance that backward compatibility may be affected. The solutions—building in conditional logic or standing up multiple live versions for different clients—may be overly complex in terms of maintenance and management.

Microservices are designed to simplify deployment. But the complexity of working with a large number of independent components can be overwhelming. Automation may help resolve this issue.

Logging can become difficult when every service uses its own database. Establishing centralised logging solutions may be necessary. Similarly, monitoring and managing each service may be unfeasible without a centralised view and single source of truth.

With potentially hundreds of microservices incorporated into a single application, traditional debugging is not an option.

While microservice architecture gives teams a fair amount of independence, issues that span more than one service within an application may demand detailed cross-team communication and coordination to set right.

Because microservices applications are distributed systems, it is not unheard of for teams to unknowingly duplicate tasks. This can result in wasted effort and inefficient applications.

In addition to the challenges addressed above, there are certain pitfalls that organisations should be aware of when considering adopting a microservices architecture:

Although a very popular approach to development architecture, microservices are generally best suited to repairing and revising existing applications that have gotten overly complex and difficult to maintain. They are not nearly as effective when used as a starting point. If the traditional approach hasn’t reached unmanageable levels, then it’s not actually a monolith in need of restructuring.

As with anything else, a service can always be divided into smaller parts. And while microservices should be granular, consisting of limited functions designed to support a greater whole, it is possible to take things too far. Instead, many companies find that starting with larger services, and then only breaking them down into microservices when they become slow to deploy or too complex to manage, helps ensure that the solution doesn’t offset the potential gains.

A large, distributed system can easily get out of hand. To ensure microservices effectiveness, organisations should incorporate advanced deployment and monitoring automation, along with managed cloud services. This can help ease much of the burden of transitioning to microservices.