Microservices Challenges and the Solution Pointers

What Are Microservices?

Gartner defines microservice as an application component that is tightly scoped, powerfully encapsulated, loosely coupled, independently deployable, and independently scalable. Microservices can communicate with each other and cater to specific business needs. Though it is a buzz in the industry, let’s ponder upon some of the challenges associated with it.

Design Complexity

Microservices have to be loosely coupled and specific in their purpose.  Utmost care needs to be taken while designing the services so as to have seamless communication between the services. The data-centric approach to design to the microservices is a solution for the design strategy.

Monitoring strategy

Microservices show diversity in terms of languages, configurations, individual logs, and infrastructure requirements. This makes monitoring of microservices more complex.  Monitoring becomes even more critical when microservices have interdependencies.

Well established monitoring and observability mechanism proves helpful in this scenario.

Security

Microservices are highly distributed and hence are vulnerable to various security issues.  Setting up accessibility based on the roles is another challenge. Microservices are deployed on the multi-cloud environment making them vulnerable to various security attacks. One has to imbibe security aspect in all the phases of micro service application development.

Operational Complexity

Microservices may need a diverse environment to run. This would inadvertently lead to issues like hard-coded IP addresses or TLS keys getting stored in the code repository. This may result in the collapse of traditional monitoring systems. Also, the coordination among the services spanning different servers and clouds is complex. Robust API management, messaging and monitoring activities as a soul-saver in the scenario.

Team Expertise

Expertise is required when one wants to move from monolithic architecture to microservice architecture. Teams should be well versed with DevOps practices and open to going ahead with a steep learning curve. They must be able to think in terms of distributed application design and interaction patterns.

 Network Management

Microservice architecture needs load balancing and a stable fault tolerance mechanism. Multiple service dependencies bring additional latency and performance delays. Strong network administration and monitoring are required to tackle the network related issues

Take Away-

When one wants to move to microservice architecture, one has to think of the architectural shift, technology differences, and staff training.  Not all applications are suited for microservice architecture. Microservices architecture is appropriate for large applications that require short release cycles, complex applications that must be highly scalable, and those with rich domains or many sub-domains.