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When Microservices Architecture Becomes a Bad Idea?
Govardhana M K
November 20, 2024
In partnership with
TechOps Examples
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Along with a use case deep dive, we identify the remote job opportunities, top news, tools, and articles in the TechOps industry.
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IN TODAY'S EDITION
🧠 Use Case
When Microservices Architecture Becomes a Bad Idea?
🚀 Top News
High-Severity Flaw in PostgreSQL Allows Hackers to Exploit Environment Variables
A high-severity flaw (CVE-2024-10979) allowing unprivileged users to manipulate environment variables, potentially enabling code execution or information disclosure. Users should update to patched versions (17.1, 16.5, etc.)
👀 Remote Jobs
Dourolabs is hiring a Platform Engineer
Remote Location: Worldwide
Wikimedia is hiring a Director of Site Reliability Engineering
Remote Location: Worldwide
GitLab is hiring a Intermediate Backend Engineer, MLOps
Remote Location: Worldwide
📚️ Resources
How SSH Secures Your Connection
SSH secures connections using encryption for confidentiality, MACs for integrity, and key exchanges for authentication, ensuring it secures remote command execution.
Getting Started with Azure Kubernetes Service
This guide covers setting up and managing AKS, deploying Spring Boot apps, monitoring with Prometheus, exposing services with Azure Application Gateway and Ingress, and integrating Argo CD for streamlined Kubernetes management.
Advanced Docker Quiz: Docker Commands, Networking, and Container Management
Test your Docker expertise with this advanced quiz on networking, multi-stage builds, health checks, and more. Perfect for seasoned DevOps pros preparing for certifications or mastering containerization.
🛠️ TOOL OF THE DAY
codegroupie - A new tool featured on November 7th, 2024, that helps to find your next coding project.
It is open source and integrates with GitHub.
🧠 USE CASE
When Microservices Architecture Becomes a Bad Idea?
One cannot take away these debates from a DevOps and Cloud engineer's lives:
Monolithic vs Microservices
Serverless vs Self-Managed Virtual Instances
Kubernetes vs Do we really need Kubernetes?
As a matter of context, let’s pick “microservices” for today.
If I have to explain the difference in one line:
Monolithic architecture is a single, tightly integrated application where all components function as one unit.
Microservices architecture is a design where the application is split into independent services communicating via APIs.
Microservices can revolutionize how you build and scale systems - but only when used in the right context.
Misaligned complexity can create a real problem, not the architecture itself.
Imagine a spectrum.
On the far left, your system has a manageable number of services:
🟨 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️
On the far right, the system has fragmented into too many services:
⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟦
The red square on the left is where microservices worked well initially:
🟨 ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟥 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟦
The green square is where the system ended up, due to uncontrolled growth:
🟨 ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟥 ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟩 ⬜️ ⬜️ 🟦
The gap between 🟥 and 🟩 is the misaligned complexity.
You can call it “the microservices sprawl”
Red Flags to Identify When Your Microservices Architecture is Becoming a Bad Idea:
🚩 Duplicate functionalities across multiple services.
🚩 Wasted resources on scaling less critical services.
🚩 Poor visibility into service health and dependencies.
🚩 Frequent cascading failures due to interdependencies.
🚩 Overlapping responsibilities with unclear service ownership.
🚩 Complex inter-service communication slows down troubleshooting.
In short,
It’s the result of too many services, fragmented ownership, and poor boundaries.
Unless you bring this under control, microservices will become a liability.
There are two ways to fix the sprawl:
1. Streamline and consolidate services
Merge services with overlapping functionalities
Reduce the granularity of services where it’s unnecessary
Centralize non-critical shared services
2. Improve operational management
Introduce robust service discovery and dependency mapping tools
Enforce architectural boundaries and team ownership
Use automation for scaling, monitoring, and troubleshooting
Sit → crawl → walk is a progression.
Monolithic → Microservices → Micro frontend is evolution, not always progression.
Sometimes Microservices → Monolithic can be the best choice.
Great architectures should solve problems with the least effort.
Thoughts?
— Govardhana Miriyala Kannaiah (@govardhana_mk)
8:34 AM • Nov 20, 2024
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