Monolith to Microservices

Chapter 5. Growing Pains

As you adopt a microservice architecture, you’ll experience challenges along the way. We’ve looked at some of these problems in passing already, but I want to explore them further to help give you some forewarning.

What I’m hoping to do with this chapter is give you just enough information about the sorts of issues you may face. I can’t solve them all in this book, and many of the problems I outline here already have a more detailed treatment in Building Microservices, which was very much written with these challenges in mind.

I also want to give you some signs to look for to help you spot when these issues may need addressing, as well as an indication of where along your journey these issues are most likely to arise.

More Services, More Pain

When exactly problems will occur with a microservice architecture is related to a multitude of factors. The complexity of service interactions, size of the organization, number of services, technology choices, latency, and uptime requirements are just a subset of the forces that can bring forth pain, suffering, excitement, and stress. This means it’s difficult to say when, or indeed if, you’ll actually encounter these issues.

In general, though, I’ve realized that the sorts of problems that arise in a company with ten services tend to be quite different from the ones seen at a company with hundreds of services. The number of services seems to be as good a measure as any for indicating when certain issues are most ...