In today’s cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, we find more application developers moving from traditional monolith architecture to the more agile and flexible microservices architecture. Increasingly, developers can now hope to work on lighter microservices-based frameworks that are faster and easier for building their application code.
Container-based microservices is among the prevailing trends with nearly 75% of organizations expected to go into production with containerized applications by 2022.
Despite all its benefits and security practices, microservices (like any other application development mode) have their share of challenges for implementing organizations. A few of these challenges even lead to major implementation failures.
Which is the major implementation-related challenges associated with the microservices architecture, and what are the best practices to be followed? Keep reading to know more.
Challenges of Implementing Microservices
What are the common challenges associated with implementing microservices? Here are a few of them:
- Determining the right level of granularity
What should be the right level of software granularity for an application component? For software architects, the granularity level is a challenge as sub-optimized application modules have their share of implementation pitfalls.
Microservices are often viewed as a combination of various entities including the data entity, processes, and utilities. If application designs are focused on any one of these entities, it can compromise the others, thus resulting in “missing out” the overall benefits of the microservices approach. For instance, a data entity-centric design can bring inflexibility to individual layers and increase complexity at the system level.
- Security-related challenges
As more microservices are deployed across multiple cloud platforms, there is the growing challenge of maintaining visibility and observability over each of its many components (or parts). Loss of control can add its vulnerabilities, thus making it harder to detect and rectify on time.
Additionally, data security poses a severe challenge in any microservices framework. The existence of distributed data across systems adds to its privacy and integrity concerns. To overcome security challenges, organizations need to configure access controls (at the right points) and secure proper authentication for each of their services.
- Large monolithic databases
Large and centralized databases often create a performance bottleneck in implementing a microservices framework, thus hindering better scalability and resilience. For instance, a database with a monolithic design can be put under “extra” load during the scaling of the microservices.
Besides, if multiple microservices are integrated into the same database tables, any database schema changes can impact other running microservices. Organizations must look for ways to move away from a monolithic database, and refractor the database into multiple physical instances that can work with microservices frameworks.
- Dependency on REST services
As against the HTTP-based SOAP, microservices expose their functionality using the default HTTP-based REST API services, which are now popular among application developers. Due to a lack of skills and experience, most developers try to avoid reactive services that are based on asynchronous messaging.
Besides, all reactive services require the additional implementation of a messaging architecture, without which, microservices can face challenges related to performance and transaction management. To reduce their dependency on REST-based APIs, developers must learn to differentiate between API-based microservices and the core set of microservices APIs.
In the next section, let us look at some of the best practices when implementing the microservices architecture.
Conclusion
Before migrating from the monolithic to the microservices framework, organizations and developers must realize the various implementation-related challenges and prepare themselves to counter them.
At Benison Technologies, we follow a modern approach to microservices development for our global customers to simplify their services. Our cloud computing services are designed to enable customers to develop or migrate their applications for the cloud.
Looking for a technology partner for implementing your microservices framework? Get in touch with us.
