In this video, we will explore and understand the top 10 challenges associated with adopting microservices, covering both engineering and organizational hurdles.
Managing microservices presents significant challenges, primarily due to the complications it brings to the infrastructure. Defining the appropriate scope for each microservice is essential; overly small services can lead to chaos, while services that are too large may result in a return to a monolithic architecture. Careful consideration is necessary when introducing new services to maintain balance and order.
One of the key challenges with microservices is about effective monitoring and logging. The presence of multiple services can create blind spots, making it crucial to have robust monitoring frameworks to track dependencies and service interactions. Utilizing distributed tracing tools, such as Zipkin, becomes essential for effectively diagnosing user-related issues.
In environments with > 20 microservices, identifying the appropriate service for communication presents significant challenges. Establishing a robust service discovery mechanism, such as a central registry or load balancers, is essential for facilitating efficient communication between these services.
A significant technical challenge in service communication is ensuring robust authentication and authorization. This is essential to prevent unauthorized access and to mitigate potential risks from rogue actions by developers. Implementing a central authorization server can effectively manage tokens and enhance security in inter-service communications.
Configuration management is a significant challenge as each service requires access to its configuration settings without hardcoding these into the codebase. Centralizing configuration management is essential for maintaining consistency across services and for securely managing sensitive information.
Transitioning from monolithic architectures to microservices is a significant and often irreversible change for an organization. Once teams embrace the autonomy afforded by microservices, reverting back to monolithic systems can create major disruptions. This regression can hinder workflows and impede engineering efficiency by increasing inter-team dependencies and necessitating more manual approvals.
Fault tolerance is essential in microservices architecture, given the likelihood of individual service failures. By designing services that are loosely coupled and enabling asynchronous communication, the impact of one service’s outage can be contained, preventing it from cascading and disrupting other services.
Testing microservices is a massive challenge due to the need for independent testing environments that needs to accurately simulate required services. This complexity poses both organizational and engineering hurdles, especially for teams making the shift from legacy systems.
