Microservices Architecture: Pros and Cons

Web Development • Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024

Explore the microservices architecture pattern, its benefits like independent deployment and team autonomy, and understand the challenges of distributed systems.

In modern web development, I’ve worked on both monolithic and microservice‑based systems. A monolith can be convenient when your application is small, but as features accumulate it becomes harder to deploy changes quickly without affecting unrelated parts of the codebase. That pain point led me to experiment with microservices, where functionality is broken into independent services that communicate over well‑defined APIs. Each microservice has its own codebase, domain and storage, and you can deploy it without redeploying the entire system.

The biggest advantage I found in adopting microservices is deployment freedom. When a team owns a service end‑to‑end, they can iterate and ship updates without waiting on other teams to coordinate releases. This autonomy also fosters specialized expertise; developers can go deep on a single domain rather than juggling the entire application at once. Because services are loosely coupled, you can scale them independently based on their workload. For example, if an image‑processing service experiences heavy traffic you can allocate more resources to it without over‑provisioning the rest of the system.

Here’s a simplified example of how two microservices might communicate in Ruby on Rails. Imagine a users service that exposes a JSON API and an orders service that fetches user details. From the orders service you might write:

require 'net/http'
 
def fetch_user(user_id)
  uri = URI("https://users.internal.example.com/v1/users/#{user_id}")
  response = Net::HTTP.get(uri)
  JSON.parse(response)
end
 
user = fetch_user(42)
puts "User name is #{user['name']}"

While this call is straightforward, every network boundary introduces latency and the possibility of failure. That is why robust error handling and retries are crucial when working with distributed services.

Adopting microservices isn’t without challenges. Deploying and monitoring dozens of services can be complex, and you need mature DevOps practices to manage infrastructure, logging and observability effectively. Data consistency becomes a concern when each service manages its own database; you may need to design for eventual consistency and implement mechanisms such as distributed transactions, idempotent operations or event sourcing to keep data synchronized. Furthermore, network overhead and API contracts must be carefully considered to prevent latency and versioning issues.

Not every project benefits from microservices. In some cases a monolithic architecture remains simpler to develop and maintain, especially for small teams or early‑stage products. I usually recommend starting with a well‑structured monolith and only breaking it apart once you feel real pain around deployment cadence or domain complexity. If you decide to embrace microservices, invest in automated testing, continuous integration and deployment pipelines to reduce the operational burden.

Ultimately, architecture decisions should align with your business goals and team capabilities. Microservices offer flexibility and independence at the cost of additional complexity. Weigh these trade‑offs carefully and choose the right approach for your project’s size, maturity and growth expectations.