Enabling Microservice Success

Chapter 13. Running Your System in Production

As I discussed in Chapter 8, engineering teams have to get much more involved in running the services they build when they adopt a microservice architecture. If you are releasing multiple changes a day, handing releases and production support over to another team would slow you down too much.

That means building systems differently, but it also means operating them in production: the focus of this chapter.

Microservices bring particular operational challenges: they are distributed systems, with many parts, and what the system as a whole looks like will generally be very different from what it looked like six months ago. As a result, documentation struggles to keep up.

I am going to start this chapter with an overview of these operational challenges, to set the context for the following sections that will provide ways to tackle them.

That starts with observability. Operating microservices is made a lot easier if you have built observability into your services and the system, and we’ll go over how to do that effectively. You should also consider building your own utilities and tools to give further insights into your system or to help with fixing problems.

Observability is about being able to infer what is going on in your system from the external outputs: logs, traces, metrics, etc. To successfully run your system in production, you also need to be able to work out when you have an issue. Easier said than done, because all the resilience ...