Are Microservices Still Good Enough?

There was a lot of hype around microservices for many years. Sometimes they are used with good reasons, sometimes without. But looks like the time for fast growth came to the end, companies started to focus more on cost reduction. It promotes more practical approach for architecture selection.

One of the recent articles about this topic is Lessons from a Decade of Complexity: Microservices to Simplicity.

The author starts with downsides of microservice architecture:
✏️ Too many tiny services. Some microservices become too small.
✏️ Reliability didn't improve. One small failure can trigger cascade failure of the system.
✏️ Network complexity. More network calls produce higher latency.
✏️ Operational and maintenance overhead. Special deployment pipelines, central monitoring, logging, alerting, resource management, upgrades coordination. This is just a small part of what's needed to serve the architecture.
✏️ Poor resource utilization. Microservices can be too small that even 10 millicores are not utilized. It makes the whole cluster resource management ineffective.

Recommendations to select the architecture:
✏️ Be pragmatic. Don’t get caught up in trendy architecture patterns, select what's really needed for your task and team now.
✏️ Start simple. Keeping things simple saves time and pain in the long run.
✏️ Split only when needed. Split services when there’s a clear technical reason, like performance, resource needs, or special hardware.
✏️ Microservices are just a tool. Use them only when they help your team move faster, stay flexible, and solve real problems.
✏️ Analyze tradeoffs. Every decision has upsides and downsides. Make the best choice for your team.

Additionally the author shared a story where he and his team consolidated hundreds of microservices into larger ones. They reduced the total number of microservices from hundreds to fewer then ten. This helped to cut down alerts, simplify deployments, and improve infrastructure usage. The overall solution support became easier and less expensive.

I hope that finally cost effectiveness of technical decisions became a new trend in software development 😉.

#engineering #architecture