Challenges with microservices

In the Challenges with autonomous software components section, we have already seen some of the challenges that autonomous software components can bring (and they all apply to microservices as well), as follows:

• Many small components that use synchronous communication can cause a chain of failure problem, especially under high load
• Keeping the configuration up to date for many small components can be challenging
• It’s hard to track a request that’s being processed and involves many components, for example, when performing root cause analysis, where each component stores log records locally
• Analyzing the usage of hardware resources on a component level can be challenging as well
• Manual configuration and management of many small components can become costly and error-prone

Another downside (but not always obvious initially) of decomposing an application into a group of autonomous components is that...