When not to use microservices: 4 challenges to consider | TechTarget (2024)

FAQs

When not to use microservices: 4 challenges to consider | TechTarget? ›

In situations where a stable network, highly available software, and quick response times are critical, the microservices setup might cause problems. For these cases, choosing a Monolithic Architecture, where everything is bundled into one unit, could be a better option.

In situations where a stable network, highly available software, and quick response times are critical, the microservices setup might cause problems. For these cases, choosing a Monolithic Architecture, where everything is bundled into one unit, could be a better option.

Microservices experience a lot of latency, which worsens with Serverless or Functions as a Service designs. One implementation pattern that worsens this problem is when service-to-service calls span multiple availability zones. Reduce your latency time by keeping calls within the same availability zone.

Duplication of efforts across implementation teams and an increased cost through multiple different technologies. Integrated testing is difficult when there are only separate microservice teams. Greater operation complexity through more moving parts, and more operational skills are required from your development team.

Disadvantages of microservices

Increased complexity: Because microservices are distributed, managing service communication can be challenging. Developers may have to write extra code to ensure smooth communication between modules.

If you are working on a new startup or brand new product which require significant change when developing and iterating your product, then you should not start with microservices. This kind of projects which's are pivot domain models so much, this will become to changes across service boundaries is an expensive way.

A microservices app is likely to face performance issues if only one service depletes its resources despite others having capacity to spare. A monolith is less likely to encounter this type of issue because resources can be allocated to a single process rather than a collection of microservices.

Decreased performance. A big disadvantage of microservices is that they consume more memory, clock-cycles and network bandwidth than a comparable monolithic architecture. A monolithic application runs all of its components within the scope of a single process.

Disadvantage #1: Microservices Are More Complex

Microservices involve a lot more moving parts than traditional applications, requiring enormous effort, careful planning, and strategically applied automations to ensure communication, monitoring, testing, and deployment processes run smoothly.

Despite many other strengths, microservices are limited in the ability to reuse code. Developers have to recreate code independently (or near-independent) from each service, which can consequently increase software development costs and time.

What happens when a microservice fails? ›

When a microservice encounters a failure, it can retry the operation after a certain delay or with an exponential backoff strategy. This can be particularly useful when the failure is due to temporary issues like network glitches or resource unavailability.

In a microservices security architecture pattern, common risks and challenges include increased attack surface due to the distributed nature of services, potential vulnerabilities in communication between microservices, difficulty in enforcing consistent security policies across multiple services, and the complexity of ...

Data Management Difficulties: Using separate microservices can make data management more difficult, as data can be distributed across services. This can lead to increased complexity in synchronizing and maintaining data.

For a small team with a simple app, a monolith architecture allows for faster development. For multiple teams working on requirements that may change, a microservices architecture allows parallel development and flexibility.

Microservice-based applications are resilient when they can continue operating if there is a failure or error in some part of the system. Fault tolerance helps applications fail fast and recover smoothly by guiding how and when certain requests occur and by providing fallback strategies to handle common errors.

Final Answer. The characteristic that is NOT a good characteristic of a Microservice is “It is implemented as a product”.

Problems of Microservices Architecture

Data consistency: Keeping data consistent across services can be challenging in a microservices architecture. Monitoring and testing: Monitoring and testing microservices can be more complex than in a monolithic architecture.