Microservices Anti-patterns

Microservices architecture has been a dominant architecture style for the last few years, it fits well into the Cloud-native architecture and the agile methodology. The business units are constantly looking for creative ways to support the faster time to market demand; and the Microservices evolution is a big part of that.

Lately, many seasoned industry experts are talking about the downfall of Microservices and how they are getting negative feedback regarding the approach from the CIO/CTO crowd.

At Logic Keepers, we believe this is the outcome of a cycle, where some did Microservices the right way and others didn’t.

Microservices is tricky, if not done right, it would lead to more cons than pros.

The design first approach for the big picture is a major factor in determining the future success of the system.

We don’t just design Microservices in silos; instead, we design systems, and we use Microservices as building blocks.

The domain model design of the services and how those services would interact with each-other must be determined at the early design phase of the project.

Unfortunately, many are growing Microservices randomly without any thought process and suffer from the Microservices anti-patterns.

If you adopted the Microservices architecture and your systems are suffering from the following symptoms, you might be running into the Microservices anti-patterns vicious cycle.

Unresponsive Systems

It is natural to experience communication latency due to the inter-service to service communication in some cases, however, there are techniques and design patterns that need to be utilized to solve this problem. Microservices shouldn’t lead to unresponsive systems or systems that are not resilient, and would fail under load.

Increased Infrastructure Cost

If you have a complex system that is comprised of too many intertwined Microservices, it will be difficult for the engineers to understand the structure and the flow, and they might end up creating redundant services and increasing the infrastructure footprint.

Slower Time to Market

You might be producing services faster than the monolith, but those services can’t be consumed once produces, instead, direct dependency and strong coupling are delaying the timelines.

Poor Maintainability

Complex systems lead to poor maintainability and makes it difficult to troubleshoot and makes it harder to identify the root cause of the system defects. Poor maintainability is a major contributing factor to slower time to market and increased development and infrastructure cost, and also, increasing the risk of exposure. Distributed environment is naturally difficult to debug and maintain, and maintainability shouldn’t be thought of after the fact, it should be carefully considered at the early phase of the project.

Getting Help

Microservices is a journey with a steep and expensive learning curve, filled with trials and errors and lessons learned the hard way.

At Logic Keepers, we work with our clients on a daily basis, providing workshops and consulting services to remedy those issues and ensure success.

Please reach out if you have any questions.