Microservices AntiPatterns and Pitfalls

Preface

In late 2006 service-oriented architecture (SOA) was all the craze. Companies were jumping on the bandwagon and embracing SOA before fully understanding the advantages and disadvantages of this very complex architecture style. Those companies that embarked on SOA projects often found constant struggles with service granularity, performance, data migrations, and in particular the organizational change that comes about with SOA. As a result, many companies either abandoned their SOA efforts or built hybrid architectures that did not fulfill all of the promises of SOA.

Today we are poised to repeat this same experience with a relatively new architecture style known as microservices. Microservices is a current trend in the industry right now, and like SOA back in the mid 2000s, is all the craze. As a result, many companies are looking toward this architecture style to leverage the benefits provided by microservices such as ease of testing, fast and easy deployments, fine-grained scalability, modularity, and overall agility. However, like SOA, companies developing microservices are finding themselves struggling with things like service granularity, data migration, organizational change, and distributed processing challenges.

As with any new technology, architecture style, or practice, antipatterns, and pitfalls usually emerge as you learn more about it and experience the many “lessons learned” during the process. While antipatterns and pitfalls may seem like the same thing, ...