8 Challenges of Adopting Microservices

Microservice adoption is skyrocketing due to the advantages it brings, especially while developing today's complex software. In one of my earlier blogs - “To Microservice or Not To Microservice Is Not The Question,” I extensively spoke about how you can decide if your organization needs microservice. A recent MarketsandMarkets Research found that the cloud microservices market increased from $683 million in 2018 to $1,880 million by 2023 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.4%. These numbers indicate an increasing preference for microservices architecture than a monolith. What's excellent about microservice adoption is that it lets developers make changes on the go. This is quite helpful when adding new features to your products. You do not have to spend much time building a complete overhaul. Testing features and making changes do not affect the entire system, shortening the release cycle and allowing services to reach the market faster.

While advantages such as greater agility, faster delivery, and cost-effectiveness are the reason behind the rise in numbers, it is not really a walk in the park. Adopting microservices brings about some challenges, and if not handled properly, these challenges can prove to be a costly affair in the long run.

Let's look at the top challenges of microservice adoption so that you know what to expect while switching to a microservice architecture.

Challenges of microservice adoption

Design complexity: When designing applications in a microservices architecture, it becomes essential that services communicate with each other seamlessly to achieve business operations. Since microservices are loosely combined services, achieving synchronization and communication can often get challenging. Architects need to handle this challenge from the very beginning. Without the correct logic, data is nonsensical, and microservice designing can get highly daunting. Novice microservice architects must consider the number of microservices along with the framework to achieve perfect integration. Getting a good understanding of the connection between each microservice and optimal boundaries goes a long way in overcoming design challenges and future complexities. If these two are unclear, breaking down the business functionalities by specific domains to create microservices can be challenging and time-consuming.
Achieving data consistency: Traditional data handling and managing techniques may no longer be practical in an architecture where many services are clubbed together. A fundamental principle of data in a microservice is that each service manages its data, giving rise to the chances of duplication of data across multiple services. Because of the independent handling of data, redundancy issues can multiply. In the case of multiple microservices being tied to the same database table, any alteration in the schema can lead to changes in other microservices because of the several independent data storage solutions present. This can cause a challenge in maintaining data consistency across services.
Security: Data in microservices can be deployed and distributed across multi-cloud environments, resulting in a substantially larger attack surface area. Maintaining user data integrity, privacy, and confidentiality in this setup gets tricky due to the loss of visibility and control of application components. Another challenge is setting up access controls and ensuring secured authentication for individual services. Testing vulnerabilities across services becomes even more complex as microservices use different infrastructure layers to communicate with each other.
Operational complexity: Managing different services in a microservices-based application requires serious effort because of the magnitude of the services. It requires sophisticated and specialized tooling to make way for automated provisioning in a resilient and secure manner. Operations will often differ because each microservices team uses independent technology and its own approach to deploying its service. This results in traditional application techniques becoming redundant that would not work effectively. Setting up accurate coordination between services for seamless operations gets tricky and needs expertise for optimum performance. Add to this the sudden spikes in application usage, and you have a challenge at hand. If one component fails, it creates a cascading effect across the entire system. A good API management approach clubbed with a solid messaging infrastructure and monitoring technique becomes essential to overcome operational complexities and challenges.
Requires expertise: Your architect and development teams play a vital role in microservices. Their knowledge and ability can make or break the transition to microservices. Switching to microservices and keeping them in optimal operational condition needs experience and expertise because of the vastness of the distributed services. Another prerequisite is that the team should be comfortable working in a DevOps culture. Even with the best platforms and programming languages for the microservice, the teams must be able to handle complexities efficiently. Knowledge of concepts like functional interfaces, CAP, BASE, CQRS, and sagas should be mandatory for all contributors.
Maintenance: Maintenance is an ongoing activity to ensure that microservices perform to their best ability. Servers can be at risk if not maintained, and even if one service breaks down, it can potentially disrupt the whole system. To ensure the availability of services, developers must constantly be on their toes to monitor and maintain. They must also be aware of failure modes and different failure scenarios and have a backup and auto-recovery plan ready. It is better to be prepared with backups than firefight outages. Rigorous checking protocols and designing rules in place help reduce the risk of data loss, security breaches, and other undesirable circumstances that may hamper the functioning of the microservice.
Complex team communications: Monolithic applications aid in adequate communication, but microservices are just the opposite. It gets challenging to achieve efficient team communication while working with microservices. As the number of microservices increases, so does communication complexity between teams. Effective communication with proper documentation becomes a must to overcome challenges from poor team communication.
Complex system communications: Like teams, a microservice infrastructure must communicate efficiently to achieve smooth functioning. Because of the way microservices are set up and the different tech stacks they use, communication between systems gets exceptionally complex. Accomplishing perfect dependencies and interoperability needs excellent communication – something that is challenging to achieve. While achieving this communication is one part, maintaining the communication is equally important. Efficient microservice communication is a crucial aspect of a successful microservice.

Now that you know the challenges you may face, you must wonder if the transition is worth it. There has been quite a debate over it in the past few years, with both sides explaining why you should and should not go for microservices. Microservices certainly have their benefits, especially with software getting more complex and targeted time to market continually reducing. The numbers prove its worth, and many organizations see the benefits of its adoption. Although to accomplish the adoption, you need to have experts on the team and think over the challenges mentioned above. Depending on the business case and feasibility, switching from monolithic applications can significantly benefit your business. Opcito has been helping organizations in the microservice adoption journey. If you are looking for a reliable partner, write us at contact@opcito.com , and we'll help you with your microservice adoption journey.