Microservices: Advantages and Disadvantages (And Whether They're Right For Your Business)

Learn the advantages and disadvantages of microservices, and how to evaluate if a microservices architecture is right for you.

A microservices architecture is a software design approach that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled services communicating through lightweight protocols. Proponents of microservices argue that isolation and thin interfaces offer optionality in implementation and composability.

But microservices aren’t always the magical solution they’re touted to be.

In this post, we’ll go over the advantages and disadvantages of microservices, and how to evaluate if a microservices architecture is right for you.

What are microservices?

A microservices architecture is an approach to software development in which solutions are composed of smaller independent services that communicate with each other over APIs. This architectural approach can be described based on the following features:

• A collection of services to handle critical features or tasks: In a microservices architecture, each microservice is built to accommodate specific features or tasks.
• Reliance on communication protocols: Services communicate with one another using communication protocols, such as HTTP resource APIs and lightweight asynchronous messaging.
• Organized by business capability: Services are organized by business capability, with the line separating services often referred to as a bounded context. For example, in ecommerce, everything that is related to customer management would be within one bounded context.

How do microservices work?

Unlike monolithic architecture in which all functions are tightly integrated, microservices architecture separates different ecommerce functions ike inventory management, checkout, and pricing into individual, loosely-coupled services. 

Some key characteristics of a microservice architecture are:

• Each microservice operates as a self-contained module that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of others.
• Microservices typically communicate with each other through APIs, making them well-suited for cloud computing environments like AWS.
• Individual services can be scaled as needed without affecting the entire system. For example, you could scale up the inventory service during a sale without touching other components.
• Different microservices can use different technologies, such as programming languages (e.g., Java), frameworks, and databases.

This flexibility lets teams choose the best tool for each specific function. Overall, the microservices architecture is valuable for complex, frequently updated applications that require high scalability and integration of different technologies. 

The advantages of microservices

A microservice architecture optimizes for a separation of concerns and coordination, which offers engineering teams more choice and autonomy. This is why many organizations opt to build with microservices.

Some of the key engineering benefits of a microservice architecture include:

Flexibility and agility

Code can be updated easily, allowing new features and functionalities to be deployed without touching the entire application. This automation allows teams to deploy updates in a granular way and experiment rapidly.

Autonomy

At the code level, developers and teams can work independently, and have the option of using a mix of different tools and frameworks. 

Faster time to market

The independent nature of microservices allows for parallel development across different teams, which can reduce development times and accelerate the launch of new features or products. 

Customization

Microservices enable extensive customization of the tech stack. Organizations can create unique solutions by integrating new technologies, such as different frameworks, code bases, providers, and tools.

Scalability

The modularity of microservices allows components to be scaled independently of one another without the need to scale the entire application.

Seven disadvantages of microservices architecture

Microservices come with significant costs and tradeoffs compared to monolithic systems: You buy optionality by paying for bespoke development and ongoing upkeep.

Most of the advantages of microservices can be achieved with an extensible platform. A well-built kernel powering the platform can provide a set of opinionated, coupled contracts and APIs that enable it to deliver the benefits of speed, cohesion, and low maintenance, while allowing for extensibility and modular configuration where it’s needed.

Below, we’ll go over the drawbacks of microservices architecture—and how a platform can deliver the same value while mitigating some common microservices pitfalls:

1. Increased maintenance costs
2. Organizational complexity and overhead
3. Coordination complexity
4. Risk of failure cascades
5. Performance and reliability issues
6. Increased security complexity
7. Difficulty with data management and consistency 

1. Increased maintenance costs

The agility and flexibility of microservices introduce operational complexity and drive up maintenance costs. However, that does not mean engineering teams need to give up on extensibility and composability as a goal with their ecommerce architecture.

Strong service-level separation and composition are key to a scalable and flexible enterprise architecture, which is best derived through the use of common shared infrastructure, code primitives, and service contracts. This enables teams to operate across services with reusable context and tools, and allows security teams to enforce system-wide guarantees.

Extensibility and composability are attributes of the system design, not of a specific choice to use microservices.

Microservices aren’t the only path to extensibility. Kernel extensions and drivers are patterns that offer the benefits of a platform—speed, cohesion, and low maintenance—while allowing for extensibility and modular configuration.

A kernel extension allows for the possibility of coupling between core kernel services, while allowing inline customization of its behavior or logic. Done well, the provided logic is executed in a secure, optimized, and managed runtime that eliminates the tradeoff between coordination, speed, and extensibility. Drivers, on the other hand, provide high-cohesion integration with the kernel and give the OS new capabilities.

2. Organizational complexity and overhead

Microservices allow developers to work independently using whatever tools and frameworks they desire, but implementing effective DevOps practices is essential to manage this independence effectively. Teams can flex their skills and deploy solutions quickly—but for business leaders, there’s an overhead cost to having a high degree of team autonomy.

You need a clear separation of responsibilities and detailed specifications as to what the interactions between microservices will be, and how they will be managed long-term and by whom. Unchecked, you lose operational leverage and benefits of shared standards, patterns, and knowledge across teams.

This leads to ballooning technical costs, added layers of upper management, and byzantine technical stacks whose functionality is only understood by those who wrote their implementation.

3. Coordination complexity

The acknowledged cost of microservices is that it requires maintaining and coordinating more moving pieces, similar to what occurs in service-oriented architecture (SOA). And even though services can be deployed in isolation, they must work together to accomplish the desired goal. Cross-service dependencies often lead to complex and brittle deployments.

Good architecture leverages component and service isolation in appropriate places. Too much of it—a common microservices pitfall—can lead to brittle deployments that are hard to audit, scale, and debug.

🚧 Cautionary tale

When Airbnb moved to a service-oriented architecture to rid itself of monolithic complexities, it found its microservices-based approach led to its own tangle of complications. The company currently has 2,000 services, managed by 500 engineers. “The dependency graph was hard to reason about,” said Jessica Tai, Airbnb tech lead manager and core services infrastructure engineer, in a 2021 InfoQ Qcon talk.

Such complexity made it hard for the Airbnb team to debug services. It also took longer to develop features due to a growing number of changes that had to be made at integration points. Services started to duplicate functionality, and data was getting fragmented.

4. Risk of failure cascades

Proliferation of services—each with its own implementation, architecture, and performance characteristics—can complicate fault isolation and significantly increase the risk of unexpected failure cascades, which require mature cross-service tracing and debugging capabilities.

The most successful platforms come with a curated set of primitives, workflows, and best practices encoded within. Well-designed opinions lead to better outcomes and success for those who adopt them.

A well-designed API and opinionated abstraction encode best practices and allow for elegant, scalable implementations. For example, an opinionated templating language can effectively eliminate cross-site scripting (XSS) and similar client-side security attacks—or at least make these attacks very hard to execute. A managed runtime with execution limits, caching, retry, and circuit breakers can also provide a strong contract and guarantee for predictable performance under extreme load.

Great opinions, encoded in platforms and SDKs, are an aid to the developer. They abstract common functionality and needs behind standard interfaces, constrain and eliminate bad patterns and choices, accelerate the path to value, and minimize development and maintenance costs.

5. Performance and reliability issues

Microservices offer total optionality in choice of technology—but the overhead of managing communication across disparate services is a common performance bottleneck.

🚧 Cautionary tale

Steve Cosenza, former Twitter senior staff engineer, explains what happens when independent teams design and build endpoints for their specific use cases with little coordination: “Microservices leads to fragmentation and, inevitably, a slowing of developer productivity. While the microservices approach enabled increased development speeds at first, it also resulted in a scattered and disjointed Twitter API.”

The absence of a shared code convention or SDK increases security risks and auditing costs, and subtle version and API incompatibilities can lead to erratic and hard-to-debug user issues.

Addressing these challenges requires a mature engineering culture, with experienced engineers who know how to debug a complex and distributed application, a well-staffed operations and reliability team, and investment in ongoing maintenance and resilience engineering.

6. Increased security complexity

Microservices architecture introduces a wider attack surface due to the proliferation of network communication between services. Each service becomes a potential entry point for malicious actors, requiring organizations to adopt robust security measures across all components.

For example, a large ecommerce company adopted microservices to improve scalability but found that their security team was overwhelmed trying to monitor and secure hundreds of individual services. A minor oversight in one service's authentication mechanism led to a significant data breach that affected millions of customers and caused substantial reputational damage.

Comprehensive security auditing becomes more difficult as the number of services grows, potentially leaving blind spots in the system's overall security posture. Teams must invest heavily in automated security scanning, centralized logging, and advanced threat detection systems to mitigate these risks effectively.

7. Data management and consistency challenges

Microservices often lead to data fragmentation across multiple databases or storage systems, each optimized for a specific service. This fragmentation complicates data management, making it difficult to maintain data consistency and integrity across the entire system.

To address these challenges, teams must implement sophisticated data synchronization mechanisms, such as event sourcing or change data capture (CDC) systems. These solutions add another layer of complexity to the architecture and require specialized knowledge to implement and maintain effectively.

Microservices use cases

• Real-time data processing and analysis: Microservices can handle real-time data processing and analysis, providing insights faster.
• Batch processing: By breaking down a task into smaller independent services, you can process multiple batches simultaneously.
• Load balancing: Microservices enable load balancing by scaling up only the services that experience heavy traffic, which is more resource-efficient.
• Machine learning: Different models or different parts of a model can be deployed as individual services, making the system more manageable and scalable.
• Internet of Things (IoT): Microservices can help handle IoT data effectively by dividing tasks among multiple services.

Are microservices right for you? (Spoiler alert: Probably not)

Microservices allow you to buy an additional layer of flexibility—the operative word being “buy.”

Microservices are notoriously expensive to build and maintain. If you’re Amazon or Netflix and you need that additional flexibility, the cost eventually will pay itself off. With complex businesses of this scale, microservices are probably worth considering.

But more often than not, microservices only introduce unnecessary cost and complexity, leading organizations to over-engineer their tech stack and pull resources away from projects that deliver value to customers.

The vast majority of businesses are better off with a robust commerce platform that can deliver the benefits of speed, cohesion, and low maintenance, while allowing for extensibility and modular configuration with prebuilt components as needed.

Shopify gives brands more freedom to innovate with the most flexible and performant platform in commerce. Our platform is composable by default, which means you no longer have to choose between a monolithic or microservices architecture. Shopify’s platform includes a full suite of best-in-class commerce capabilities, but brands can also choose to swap Shopify-native capabilities with other third-party systems thanks to a large library of integrations with all major front- and back-end systems.

While there’s no single recipe for success, a well-built platform can reduce work, cost, and risk, while accelerating time to market and allowing businesses to flex their technical expertise where it really matters: becoming indispensable to their customers.

Microservices FAQ

What is the biggest problem with microservices?

Microservices have an inherent complexity that makes them hard to manage. To work smoothly, they need a well-planned architecture, which makes initial setup and ongoing management hard. A distributed system also introduces issues like network latency, fault tolerance, message passing, and data consistency.

What are the cons of microservices vs. monolithic applications?

Microservices have several disadvantages compared to a monolithic application. Distributed services can be harder to manage because they need coordination between different services, which can cause network latency. It can also be hard to keep data consistent, since each service can have its own database, and transactions across multiple services can be complicated. Refactoring is often required to transition from monolithic to microservices, which can also be complex.

When should you not use microservices?

When the application is simple or small, you shouldn’t use microservices. It’s best to avoid microservices if your development team doesn’t have experience with distributed systems, network communication, and complex transactions. Microservices might not be worth the setup time and complexity for projects with tight timelines, especially when more traditional software development methodologies would suffice. If your development team lacks the right experience or certifications in distributed systems, microservices may also not be ideal.

What is better than microservices?

Traditional architectures can be more efficient and straightforward for smaller, simpler applications. A modular monolith can also provide some benefits of microservices without the complexity of distributed systems. Despite their potential for scalability and performance, serverless architecture and event-driven architecture might be considered “better” in specific scenarios.