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Due to their high resilience, high availability, and highly scalable nature, microservices are an enticing implementation option for many problem solutions.
But beneath the simple and elegant surface, microservices mask levels of complexity and failure scenarios which were never a consideration for monolithic systems. We’ve made this journey many times and can navigate you through the potential pitfalls of microservice development
Scalability is often cited as one of the greatest benefits of a microservice architecture. With microserives scalability can be achieved in a more efficient manner than with a monolithic architecture. Scaling of microservices is not infinite and is not without cost.
As you scale a service, you also need to scale infrastructure components, scaling increases pressure on dependencies, other services and resources within your eco-system. Can your downstream services handle the extra load? Is your persistence layer able to absorb the increased capacity? When scaling microservices there is a very real risk of not only pushing the problem downstream, but the risk of compounding the problem, and inadvertently creating issues far worse than the initial scaling challenge.
Perhaps the most popular reason for choosing a microservice architecture is the ability to have more people working independently. Smaller teams working on loosely coupled services results in reduced delivery contention. With each microservice having an independent life-cycle, changes can be quickly applied to a live system without the coordination overhead of incomplete and/or unrelated features in other areas of the system. CI/CD pipelines enable us to deploy fast and deploy often, with extensive automated testing giving us the assurances that high quality levels will be maintained.
Paradoxically, despite microservices offering high-levels of availability, by adopting a microservices architecture you are actually increasing the opportunity for failure. A microservice architecture leaves us more exposed to network issues, the interaction between services means we have to deal with dependent services being unavailable, failing to respond, sending delayed responses, duplicate messages…. In short, microservices will fail, and they will do so in many ways you were not expecting. That is why a microservice must be designed for failure.
Lydtech's expertise in developing robust and resilient microservices means that we are familiar with the patterns to ensure that when failures do occur, your system takes them in it’s stride and disaster is averted.
