Microservices challenges

In the previous section, you learned about the right design decisions to be taken, and the trade-offs to be applied. In this section, we will review some of the challenges with microservices, and how to address them for a successful microservice development.

Data islands

Microservices abstract their own local transactional store, which is used for their own transactional purposes. The type of store and the data structure will be optimized for the services offered by the microservice.

For example, if we want to develop a customer relationship graph, we may use a graph database like Neo4j, OrientDB, and the like. A predictive text search to find out a customer based on any related information such as passport number, address, e-mail, phone, and so on could be best realized using an indexed search database like Elasticsearch or Solr.

This will place us into a unique situation of fragmenting data into heterogeneous data islands. For example, Customer, Loyalty Points, Reservations...