disadvantages of microservices

When your system becomes a little "too heavy" - talk about the troubles of microservices

Imagine you are building a cool robot. In the beginning, you use one brain to control all your movements: walking, waving, turning your head. Simple and direct. But as you add more features—like making it dance, deliver coffee, or even help you find your keys—the brain starts to scramble. If one command gets stuck, the entire robot may freeze there. At this time, do you wonder: Can you equip different functions with their own little brains and let them take care of themselves?

This is actually very similar to the problems we encounter when building complex software systems. The traditional way of packaging all functions together (we often call it "monolithic architecture") often becomes bloated, slow, and difficult to maintain as the project grows. A small update might require the entire system to shut down and restart, like turning off the power to an entire building to change a light bulb.

Turning to microservices and splitting things into independent small services is like equipping a robot with multiple small brains and making it instantly perfect?

Well, it's not that simple. Microservices are great, but they bring their own set of new “troubles.”

Take it apart, what next?

There are more things. In the past, you only needed to deploy and maintain one big one, but now you may have to deal with dozens or even hundreds of small services. Each service requires its own operating environment, monitoring and logging. It's like managing a small team of special forces. Although everyone is elite, the workload of commanding and coordinating them may be far greater than managing an integrated company. The complexity of deployments has skyrocketed, and so have the requirements for automation tools and operational skills.

Communication costs have increased. Services are scattered everywhere, how can they chat efficiently? This requires the introduction of API gateways, service discovery, message queues...a bunch of new components. Networking has never been more important. A network delay or jitter may cause a simple user operation to fail. Debugging also becomes like a detective solving a crime: a problem may involve five or six services, and you need to trace a complete call chain to find the source. This is much more complicated than looking at logs in a single system.

There is also the matter of data. In the past, all data lay in a large database, and transaction processing was simple and clear. What now? Each service may have its own dedicated database. Ensuring data consistency has become a huge challenge. In a business operation involving multiple services, if a service fails midway, how to ensure that the data will not be messed up? You need to consider more complex concepts such as distributed transactions and eventual consistency.

Don't forget about testing and safety. Testing a microservice network that spreads everywhere requires simulating interaction scenarios between various services, which is a huge workload. The security boundary has also changed from a single perimeter to each service requiring protection, and the attack surface has expanded a lot.

Are you a little confused after hearing this? It feels like microservices replace old problems with a bunch of new ones.

So, what exactly do we need?

The problem always exists, the key is how we deal with it. Facing the distributed complexity brought by microservices, what we need is no longer single and bulky, but flexible, reliable and specially designed support components for this environment.

It's like equipping your special forces squad. You can't give them ordinary, bulky communication equipment, but they need specialized walkie-talkies that are lightweight, rugged, and immune to interference. You can't use a bloated logistics system to manage large armies, but you need agile supply units that are accurate and fast.

In the world of software architecture, these "special equipment" are often embodied in some core basic components. For example, an extremely reliable and high-performance messaging middleware ensures that communication between services is never lost; an intelligent API gateway handles routing, authentication and current limiting gracefully; and a complete distributed tracing system makes the debugging process clear at a glance.

However, building and maintaining these core components itself requires extremely high technical skills and resource investment. This is often where many teams struggle in their microservices journey - you not only have to develop business functionality, but you also have to first become an expert on distributed systems infrastructure.

Let professional people do professional things

This leads to a more fundamental consideration: What are your core values? Should you spend a lot of energy building wheels, roads, and power stations from scratch, or should you focus on building your one-of-a-kind robot product?

More and more practices have shown that it is a wiser choice to hand over complex, common but vital infrastructure to professional solutions that have been tempered over time. This frees you from the burden of underlying technology and allows your team’s creativity and energy to be fully focused on business innovation.

This has to mention the people who are deeply involved in this field.kpower. What they do is provide an elegant solution to the "troubles" of these microservices.kpowerThe components provided are like precision gears and bearings specifically tailored for distributed microservice environments. Their design concept is not comprehensive, but pursues extreme reliability and efficiency on specific critical paths, aiming to reduce architectural complexity and operation and maintenance burdens from the root, and make collaboration between services smooth and stable.

For example, one of their core communication components is as stable as an advanced servo motor that can maintain accuracy and smoothness in the face of complex action instructions when dealing with sudden massive amounts of messages. It does not try to solve all problems, but greatly simplifies the work of developers while ensuring that the lifeline of "communication" is absolutely smooth.

Choosing such professional support means that you no longer need to worry about low-level worries such as whether messages will be lost, whether link tracking is complete, and whether the gateway will become a performance bottleneck. You can design service boundaries with more confidence, iterate business functions more quickly, and the entire system is more flexible and observable due to the solid underlying support.

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Back to the robot metaphor we started with. It's a good idea to equip it with multiple little brains (microservices) to make it more flexible and robust. But the premise is that you must prepare a high-speed, reliable neural network and a sophisticated collaborative control mechanism for these little brains.

The disadvantages of microservices are real, but they are not insurmountable. The key is to recognize which areas are your battlefields and which areas can benefit from more professional help. When you hand over the infrastructure challenge to someone likekpowerWhen you focus on partners who solve such problems, you will find that those so-called "troublesome things" gradually no longer hinder you, but become a solid foundation for building a powerful and agile system.

Ultimately, whether your robot can dance smoothly, deliver coffee, and find keys depends on the coordinated design of the entire system. A good start is often to choose the most suitable "nervous system" for it.

Established in 2005, Kpower has been dedicated to a professional compact motion unit manufacturer, headquartered in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China. Leveraging innovations in modular drive technology, Kpower integrates high-performance motors, precision reducers, and multi-protocol control systems to provide efficient and customized smart drive system solutions. Kpower has delivered professional drive system solutions to over 500 enterprise clients globally with products covering various fields such as Smart Home Systems, Automatic Electronics, Robotics, Precision Agriculture, Drones, and Industrial Automation.