Microservice Trade-Offs

Microservice Trade-Offs

Many development teams have found the microservices architectural style to be a superior approach to a monolithic architecture. But other teams have found them to be a productivity-sapping burden. Like any architectural style, microservices bring costs and benefits. To make a sensible choice you have to understand these and apply them to your specific context.

Translations: Japanese · Korean

Martin Fowler

01 July 2015

Microservices provide benefits…

• Strong Module Boundaries: Microservices reinforce modular structure, which is particularly important for larger teams.



• Independent Deployment: Simple services are easier to deploy, and since they are autonomous, are less likely to cause system failures when they go wrong.



• Technology Diversity: With microservices you can mix multiple languages, development frameworks and data-storage technologies.

…but come with costs

• Distribution: Distributed systems are harder to program, since remote calls are slow and are always at risk of failure.



• Eventual Consistency: Maintaining strong consistency is extremely difficult for a distributed system, which means everyone has to manage eventual consistency.



• Operational Complexity: You need a mature operations team to manage lots of services, which are being redeployed regularly.