Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#1

Post by mymmaster » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 3:47 PM UTC

I'm working on a book about microservices and want to know what questions and topics you'd like to see covered.

What were your biggest hurdles when first adopting microservices? Was it hard for your team to determine service boundaries? Did you struggle with developing and managing them?

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#2

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#3

Post by patothon » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

Long term ownership of services is always a problem.

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#4

Post by geekjock » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

One of my biggest hurdles was trying to figure out if microservices were right for us (a small distributed team) and then communicating/selling the benefit of them to my team and bosses.

This involved creating a mutually agreed upon definition of what we actually meant by "microservices". I literally repurposed paragraphs out of Sam Newman's book to do this.

As a small team, I also didn't have examples to support my argument that microservices would benefit us.

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#5

Post by williamstein » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:06 PM UTC

For us, it was managing them, in all senses (development, logging, secure communcation between, etc.). Kubernetes and (Calico for networking) help dramatically to address these problems. I finally really see the value in microservices; before we started using Kubernetes, all my attempts with a microservices approach made me hate them.

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#6

Post by firefoxNX11 » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

Handling common concerns in each microservice such as authentication and authorization, building resiliency in each µservice, managing each µservice configurations. This causes duplicated effort in each µservice. Need to look at service mesh (istio, linkerd).

Handling service discovery, API gateway in ever-changing kubernetes ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#7

Post by cygned » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

On a technical note, distributed transactions are tough to get right.

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#8

Post by yodon » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

Orchestration: Keeping track of what versions of what services need to be live, where services should find the correct versions of the other services they need to talk to, spinning up staging, production, and test versions of services, feature flagging services, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#9

Post by ryancouto » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

New docs / APIs / terminology / versioning

Re: Ask HN: What's your biggest struggle with Microservices?

#10

Post by yellowbeard » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

Development environment becomes somewhere between extremely hard and impossible to set up. Resign yourself to running tests locally with staging as the only place to test your services talking to each other. This is my experience at a medium size public company on the bay area.