Mittwoch, 31 Januar 2023

TOP 4 common mistakes while migrating to microservice architecture - and how you can avoid them!

Christoph Ebeling

Founder & Managing Director

As more and more companies adopt microservice architecture, it is important to understand the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them. In our years of experience as DevOps consultants, we have seen a few common mistakes that can lead to problems down the road. Here are the top four mistakes we've seen, with recommendations on how you can avoid them.

  1. Shared database: In this mistake, multiple services share a database and are strongly coupled. This can lead to issues with migration, as changes to one service can affect the others. Moreover this leads to a lack of data encapsulation, which means that business logic between services needs to be shared. To avoid this mistake, make sure that each service has its own independent database.

  2. Distributed monolith: This mistake is similar to the shared database, however instead of sharing a single database, the services have independent databases yet are still strongly coupled. This can lead to slow queries to an external service, or complexity in maintaining a properly cached local version of the data. To avoid this mistake, make sure that your services are designed to be independent and can be changed without affecting other services.

  3. Premature optimization: In this mistake, microservices are created even though the software or domain architecture is not clear. This can lead to a premature separation of services , which can result in a lack of independence. To avoid this mistake, make sure that your software or domain architecture is well-defined before creating microservices.

  4. God models/microservices: In this mistake a single microservice handles significantly more than it should. This can lead to complexity and maintainability issues. To avoid this mistake, make sure that each microservice is focused on a single, well-defined responsibility.

In addition to these four common mistakes, we also often see issues with unstandardized and untested communication between services. APIs between services may not follow semantic versioning, event messages may not be properly documented or shared, and complex APIs may not be managed with consumer-driven contract tests. To avoid these mistakes, make sure that communication between services is well-defined and tested.

In summary, microservice architecture can bring many advantages, however it is important to avoid common pitfalls. By avoiding the four aforementioned mistakes and by ensuring that communication between services is standardized and tested, you can ensure that your microservices will be successful and beneficial to your organization.

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