Microservice Issues, Challenges, and Hurdles

The importance of IT services for business has been recognized across the globe for years. One of the services available to enterprises is the employment of microservices. Microservices facilitate the process of building and testing applications, as well as maintaining them. Each component of the application is developed separately, which means that if any component fails, the remaining ones will still function. The duration of building applications is reduced as well. For developers, the use of a microservice setup means also a broader choice of languages and frameworks to work with. However, the experts from Firewall Technical notice that the microservice architecture can also pose some challenges:

Supporting Variety of Components

Since each microservices setup can be made with the use of different frameworks, APIs, and languages, it is more difficult to support all the components. If a new service needs to be introduced, team members have to make sure it will work with the already existing infrastructure.

Complexity of the Architecture

The architecture for microservice applications is much more complex than for legacy applications, as the teams need to manage many different components. To successfully handle this complexity, new tools need to be implemented. The increased interaction among many services increases the risk of possible failure as well.

Closer Monitoring

In order to avoid chaos, close monitoring is absolutely crucial. Any failure needs to be noted immediately as it might be impossible to fix it later with multiple teams working on different parts of the microservices setup.

Preparing a Failure Strategy

In order to avoid a crash of the entire system, team members need to be prepared for failures and respond with a good strategy that would keep the services running despite the breakdown.

More Complicated Security System

A higher number of components means a higher risk of attacks by hackers and other cybercriminals. The security team needs to handle a variety of operating systems, languages and frameworks to keep the whole system secure.

Logging

Since the log messages generated by microservices are distributed across multiple hosts, without a good strategy for logging you will be unable to understand the issues that might occur in the application.

Issues for Developers

Working with multiple microservices simultaneously can pose a considerable challenge for developers. Additionally, even when they have experience working in this kind of setup, this does not mean that the rest of the team have the same knowledge and understanding of various processes. This may cause difficulties in cooperation across different teams.

Testing Is Not Always Easy

As can be expected, testing is also more complicated for microservices than for monolith applications. Since microservices-based applications often tend to be asynchronous in comparison to monolithic applications, creating and implementing automated and manual tests can pose a bigger challenge.

Risk of Slow Performance

Another issue that needs to be overcome is the potential slow performance of a microservice-based application. As each microservice consumes resources, the burden on servers is greater than with monolithic applications. This increase in resource usage may cause the application to run slower. In order to fix it, you need to deploy additional servers.

Issues With Consistency

As microservices need multiple resources to update, developers need to make sure the components are synchronized to avoid unexpected bugs. There is also a need for greater communication between developers and other team members.

Higher Maintenance Costs

The cost of maintaining separate environments may turn out to be higher than the cost of managing monolith applications.

Challenges With Standardization

In order to efficiently manage the entire infrastructure, standardization strategies need to be implemented. With multiple teams working on different applications and their components, the plan for standardization needs to be designed carefully.

Broad Range of Skills Needed

To successfully manage microservices applications you should be familiar with multiple programming languages, frameworks, and APIs as one application can contain components based on different tools.

Conclusion: Plan Ahead and Choose Wisely

In conclusion, implementation of microservices brings a range of challenges. However, they can be overcome with the right strategy. Knowing when and where to look for solutions can help you take advantage of all the benefits that microservice architecture has to offer. To make a smart decision, think about what solution would work for your business best. If you can handle the pressure of managing a variety of operating tasks, you might be able to realize the full potential of microservices. Note that they allow for a faster delivery, as separate teams can work on smaller parts of the project. Additionally, developers will appreciate the fact that each component can be built with the most appropriate tools (languages, frameworks, APIs, etc.).