Microservices: Benefits and Liabilities

Microservice Architecture is a pattern for implementing business logic within an organization using a suite of small and independent services that are running in their own processes. They are able to communicate with each other through network calls, and as an architectural approach provides many options for solving the problems we may confront.

Microservices: Benefits and Liabilities

It is known that any technology includes benefits and liabilities before implementing them, and microservices architecture is not an exception to that norm. Once we have a good overview of the definition of Microservices architecture, it is wise to have a more precise understanding of the benefits and liabilities provided.  

Benefits

Rapid development of business functionalities

The Microservices architecture offers autonomous service development, which assists us with the rapid development of business functionalities. Transforming a business functionality to a production software application functionality entails several software lifecycle phases, principally because of the size of the system and the corresponding dependencies. However, due to autonomous service development, it is necessary only to focus on the interface and the functionality of the service (not the functionality of the whole system, which is extremely complicated), since all the other services just communicate through the network calls using service interfaces.

Replaceability

Microservices are replaceable because of their autonomous nature. Since we are designing services as independent entities, which communicate via specified APIs, we are able effortlessly to replace that functionality with another one. Particular functionality, limited scope to the whole system, and an independent runtime can make our lives easier to develop a replaceable service.

Failure isolation

Replaceability also assists us to carry out failure isolation. Microservices-based applications are not capable of being shut down like regular Monolithic applications due to the failure of any given component of the system. Utilizing proper observability tools could help us to identify or predict potential failures.

Agile deployment and scalability

Flexibility on deployment and scaling could easily be the most significant characteristics of Microservices. Due to cloud-native approaches and container infrastructures, the ability to easily deploy a service and scale it dynamically is an especially simple task.

Liabilities

The majority of the liabilities of the Microservices are provoked due to the predicted increment of services across our system.

Inter-Service Communication

The increased complexity of inter-service communication could probably be more exacting than the implementation of the actual services. The software developers should spend an extended period of time joining up microservices as a solid entity so as to create a muti-part business functionality.

Distributed Data Management

Since the Microservices architecture encourages localizing the data to a service, distributed data management and transactions will be pretty formidable. With a microservices architecture, the most common pattern is a database per microservice, so transactions need to span across separate databases. Consequently, two key problems with distributed transaction management are the strategy to sustain a transaction’s atomicity and the transaction isolation level for concurrent requests.

Service Governance

Having many services communicated over the network also complicates the governance and observability of services. Microservices governance is a process that helps developers to manage the microservices in order to deliver results to business stakeholders. If you don’t have the proper governance and observability tools in place, it will be a nightmare to detect service dependencies and potential failures. For instance, lifecycle management, policies, standards, best practices, reusability, service discovery, organization, API integration, testing, monitoring, quality of service, and various other service governance capabilities will become more complex with a Microservices architecture.

Summary

In a microservices world where each microservice has its own data store and complex inter-service communication, it is convoluted to keep the consistency of data and help an organization align its business goals through a set of defined standards. Nevertheless, the rapid development, improved fault isolation, and ease of understanding of the codebase are some of the main benefits provided by the Microservices architecture. 

This post originally appeared on my Medium blog account at https://medium.com/@andreaspriftiswriting/microservices-benefits-and-liabilities-b1ea2f31d52c