Five key mistakes to avoid through better Microservices Governance

Technology for the sake of it

Adopting a Microservices architecture is a major shift in mindset, organizational culture and team structure.

The fact that Google, Amazon, and Netflix are using a certain technology stack doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good fit for all.

Successful Microservices implementations follow a DevOps software deployment model. This means that the team who builds it is responsible to run it, maintain it and to scale it when and where necessary.

So, the first thing to be mindful of is that you don’t adopt Microservices only because it’s the latest greatest success story to come out of the tech industry.

Becoming Tool-centric

Another common mistake is becoming overly tool-centric as opposed to considering the end results, as well as, the skills necessary for getting the best out of moving to Microservices.

Yes, tools are important. But remember, tools are a means to get to an end. In moving to a Microservices architecture, keep your end-goal in sight.

There are some great tools out there and their appeal can obscure the primary objectives for which an organization began a move to Microservices in the first place

It behooves IT organizations to escape the persistent belief that there’s a magic tool, product or resource that somehow negates the need for most of the work associated with moving to a new architectural style.

It’s difficult to know the costs

Cost is another area of switching to Microservices where underestimation is a common mistake.

Because each Microservice is independently scalable, each service requires its own exclusive infrastructure.

And with Microservices, there are a lot of moving parts, much more than with monoliths. With each service requiring its own environment, the costs soon pile up.

Services need to communicate with each other. Depending on the service design, this can mean a lot of remote calls. This higher volume of remote calls has associated (and expensive) costs in terms of network latency and processing.

Without governing guidelines to regulate cost, microservices expenditure can quickly skyrocket.

Cross-cutting capabilities

Cross-cutting concerns in Microservices are another area where organizations try to reinvent the wheel.

Concerns like logging, health checks, externalized configurations, metrics, and distributed tracing are among the architectural considerations that developers build custom solutions. If not governed, different teams tend to re-invent the wheel with similar solutions. A Service Mesh provides most of these cross-cutting capabilities and can be leveraged as part of governed Microservice architecture.

Besides these generic concerns, there are also technology-specific cross-cutting concerns. Not to mention concerns about the volume of services and technologies in a Microservices topology.

Sharing Data

Perhaps the most obvious mistake to avoid is that organizations usually want to implement their Microservice architecture using their old and trusted relational database.

Challenges can soon emerge if you have several different Microservices updating a single relational database. You run into data currency and consistency issues.

Governing principles on data sharing must be in place well before a microservices architecture is adopted.

There are all kinds of intricate and implicit dependencies between how services share and interpret data.

Because all of the microservices in an application cannot directly update or call on the main database, it’s likely that they ought to have their own database.

Depending on the complexity of the business, each Microservice’s database may have to be designed to solve questions of time delay, network availability, failures, and currency.

And you may even need to design and develop an asynchronous database network because not all services require current, up-to-date data.