Microservices: The Good, the Bad, & the Balance

When it comes to large, complicated enterprise applications, one way to get over the speed and innovation hump is to adopt a microservices architecture.

Microservices enable applications to be broken down into smaller, self-contained components that can be worked on separately from the other components within the application suite.

Doing so enables teams to easily develop, test, and deploy isolated changes without impacting the application as a whole.

Let’s a look at some of the benefits microservices provide:

• The 1-hour deployment window typical of a monolith application is significantly reduced.
• Zero-downtime deployments are made possible since microservices can be taken down individually.
• Teams can leverage backwards compatibility and feature flags.
• Dark Launches are significantly simplified with microservices compared to the monolith.
• By designing code in a way that separates application dependencies, failures and security risks can be easily identified.
• Since microservices are distributed, each can grow or be replicated independently, making it easier to scale.

So, what’s the hold up?

A single microservice is easy to develop and deploy. But when hundreds or thousands of microservices need to be deployed to make an application work, teams working with traditional release processes and tools can no longer manage all the dependencies, even at traditional delivery speeds. Add to that the complexity of having multiple containers to organize and manage the various microservices and teams will start to feel a slew of new headaches. Let’s take a look at some of those headaches:

• More application components mean more configurations to manage, more nodes to account for, and more scaling.
• Log management becomes significantly more complicated, requiring the creation of a data lake and a centralized logging solution.
• Release processes become opaque and require a plugin to provide visibility.
• Releases can still be dependent on other components, regardless of backwards compatible APIs and feature flags.
• Teams need to buy-in to the use of feature flags.
• Security becomes more complicated as more microservices are introduced, making it more difficult to identify the root cause in security lapses.

XebiaLabs for microservices

To reap the benefits of microservices at scale while also reducing application delivery cycle times and improving quality, enterprises need smarter automation, better visibility, and standard controls applied across the entire environment. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform lets you automate deployments, orchestrate releases, and gives you full visibility into your interdependent microservices release pipelines from a single interface. XebiaLabs gives your team visual status dashboards so you can easily see pipeline status, capture metrics, and run reports on every microservice in your environment. You can easily define and run coordinated delivery processes for complex microservices scenarios, automating and standardizing complex deployments to any target environment. With XebiaLabs, you can create a microservices framework that enables you to:

• Automatically verify dependencies between services before deployments.
• Automatically deploy missing dependencies.
• Automatically enforce procedures needed for compliance and captures data needed for audits.
• Run delivery processes for microservices scenarios that include both manual and automated steps.
• Leverage release templates designed to handle decoupled release trains, coordinated master and subreleases, and other advanced release patterns.
• Easily visualize which versions of which services are running in your environments.
• Automatically roll back on errors.

See for yourself. Try the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform today for free!

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Learn More:

• XebiaLabs for Microservices
• Scale Enterprise Deployment of Containers with XebiaLabs
• Exploring the Uncharted Territory of Microservices
• Developing a Microservices Pipeline