Microservices Are Perfect, Are They Not?
December 31, 2024
“Microservices” is another synergetic jargon term that is looping the IT industry like the latest viral video. Microservices are replacing monolithic architecture and are supposed to resolve all architectural problems. Cerbos’s article says otherwise: “The Value Of Monitoring And Observability In Microservices, And Associated Challenges.” The article is part of a ten part series that focuses on how to effectively handle any challenges during a transfer from a monolithic architecture to microservices.
This particular article is chapter five and it stresses how observability and monitoring are important to know what is happening on every level of a microservices application. This is important because a microservices environment has multiple tasks concurrently running and it makes traditional tools obsolete. Observability means using tools to observe the system’s internal status, while monitoring tools collect and analyze traces, logs, and metrics. When the two are combined, it provides an overall consensus of a system’s health. The challenges of installing monitoring and observability tools in a microservices architecture are as follows:
1. “Interaction of data silos. Treating each microservice separately when implementing monitoring and observability solutions creates “data silos”. These silos are easy to understand in isolation, without fully understanding how they interact as one. This can lead to difficulty when debugging or understanding the root cause of problems.
2. Scalability. As your microservices architecture scales, the complexity of monitoring and observability grows with it. So monitoring everything with the same tools you were using for a single monolith quickly becomes unmanageable.
3. Lack of standard tools. One of the benefits of microservices is that different teams can choose the data storage system that makes the most sense for their microservice (as we covered in blog 2 of the series, “Data management and consistency”). But, if you don’t have a standard for monitoring and observability, tying siloed insights together to gain insights on the system as a whole is challenging.”
The foundations for observability are installing tools that track metrics, logging, and tracing. Metrics are quantitative measurements of a system that include: error rates, throughput, resource utilization, and response time. These provide a system’s overall performance. Logging means capturing and centralizing log messages made by services like applications. Tracing follows end-to-end requests between services. They provide valuable insights into potential bottlenecks and errors.
This article verifies what we already know with every new technology adoption: same problems, new packaging. There isn’t any solution that will solve all technology problems. New technology has its own issues that will resolve old problems but bring up new ones. There’s no such thing as a one stop shop.
Whitney Grace, December 31, 2024
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