Microservices are currently a hot topic where many organizations are in the process of moving from monoliths to microservices. Understanding the trade-offs and pitfalls of microservices-based distributed architecture is key to successfully reaping the benefits of this distributed architecture.

1. Messing Up Your Microservices
An Opinionated View
The 100% Guaranteed Way
Hamburg, 2022

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Online Banking in 2019
• Business –> Buy now Pay Later
• Employees –>1551
• Microservices –> 1500
Monzo Online Banking
Messing Up Your Microservices

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• Faster development cycles (easier deployment and
debugging)
• End to end ownership
• Platform- and language agnostic services
• Distributed architecture
• Faster time to market
• Better scalability
• Standardized service contract
• Loose coupling
• Service abstraction
• Service reusability
• DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
• Service autonomy
• Service statelessness
• Service discoverability
• Service composability
• Greater agility
• Isolated services have better fault tolerance
• Easier to create a CI/CD pipeline for single-
responsibility
Messing Up Your Microservices
Google Search Engine Promises

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Let’s start Messing up Microservices
Messing Up Your Microservices
Architectural
Tinkering
Reinventing
the Wheel
Shiny Object
Syndrome

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Let’s adopt Shiny Object Syndrome
Messing Up Your Microservices
Psychological
Culture
Others
•Job security and insurance policy
•Justification of exceptional smart
sounding title
•Include the number of
microservices rolled out in the
team’s OKR
•Micro-managers decide about
the micro-services without
architectural insights
•Developing microservices
without thinking about
operational costs and ROI

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Let’s Reinvent the Wheel – Why not?
Messing Up Your Microservices
Psychological
Culture
Others
•Proud creator of service silos
which might exist in the
organization.
•I hate microservices so I
don’t care.
•Everyone should make their
own gateway service.
•Want to use our service?
Recall Separation of
Concern.
•Wrapper service around
other service to make them
secure and reliable
•Let’s create our own
configuration
provider service

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Let’s tinker Architectural Design
• Build bottleneck services with synchronous APIs
• Consider REST API as a microservice
• Involve customer to assist in chaos testing because “Live Testing” is real
thing. Design Thinking approach!
• Too many services, let’s package them in a single place
• Microservice across a horizontal layers e.g., data access or messaging.
• Mocking Loose Coupling
• We changed our service, so you better change as well otherwise
we won’t talk
• Abusing high functional cohesion
• Bounded Contexts Mix-ups
• Follow separation of concern, don‘t let anyone talk about your service, it
is non of their concern
• Adopt custom Logging mechanisms for micro ervices
• …..
Messing Up Your Microservices

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Design Bottleneck Service
Messing Up Your Microservices

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Design Bottleneck Service
Messing Up Your Microservices

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Design Bottleneck Service
Messing Up Your Microservices

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Mix Up Bounded Context
Messing Up Your Microservices
Microservices
Monolith

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Mix Up Bounded Context
Messing Up Your Microservices
Microservices
Monolith

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Mix Up Bounded Context
Messing Up Your Microservices
Service
C
Service
B
Service
A
Service
F
Service
D
Service
H
Service
E
Service
I
Service
J
Service
G
Microservices
Monolith

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Mix Up Bounded Context
Messing Up Your Microservices
Service
C
Service
B
Service
A
Service
F
Service
D
Service
H
Service
E
Service
I
Service
J
Service
G
Microservices
Monolith
Strangler Pattern?
• Popular design pattern to incrementally transform your monolithic application into microservices.
• It replacing a particular functionality with a new service.
• Once the new functionality is ready, the old component is strangled.
• The new service is put into use.
• The old component is decommissioned altogether.

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Mix Up Bounded Context
Messing Up Your Microservices
Service
C
Service
B
Service
A
Service
F
Service
D
Service
H
Service
E
Service
I
Service
J
Service
G
Microservices
Monolith
Strangler Pattern?
• Popular design pattern to incrementally transform your monolithic application into microservices.
• It replacing a particular functionality with a new service.
• Once the new functionality is ready, the old component is strangled.
• The new service is put into use.
• The old component is decommissioned altogether.

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Mix Up Bounded Context
Messing Up Your Microservices
Microservices
Domain Driven Design –> Bounded Context
• I need a mouse. Mouse in the context of computer
hardware or Zoology
• Will you take a pizza slice? Which and Why?
• Similar to the decade long unsettled debate, which
programming language is the best?

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RESTful Service is a Microservice
Messing Up Your Microservices
REST Interface
Database
Cache
Order Module
Config
Meta
Fulfilment Module
Shipping Payment

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RESTful Service is a Microservice
Messing Up Your Microservices
REST Interface
Database
Cache
Order Module
Config
Meta
Fulfilment Module
Shipping Payment

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Messing Up Your Microservices
Respect Tight Coupling – Cascading Failure
Order
Service
Payment
Service
External
PayPal
Service
Shipping
Service
Fulfilment
Service
Invoice
Service
Messaging
Service

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Messing Up Your Microservices
Respect Tight Coupling – Cascading Failure
Order
Service
Payment
Service
External
PayPal
Service
Shipping
Service
Fulfilment
Service
Invoice
Service
Messaging
Service

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Messing Up Your Microservices
Respect Tight Coupling – Cascading Failure
Order
Service
Payment
Service
External
PayPal
Service
Shipping
Service
Fulfilment
Service
Invoice
Service
Messaging
Service

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Messing Up Your Microservices
Respect Tight Coupling – Cascading Failure
Order
Service
Payment
Service
External
PayPal
Service
Shipping
Service
Fulfilment
Service
Invoice
Service
Messaging
Service

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Messing Up Your Microservices
Respect Tight Coupling – Cascading Failure
Order
Service
Payment
Service
External
PayPal
Service
Shipping
Service
Fulfilment
Service
Invoice
Service
Messaging
Service

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Summary
• Microservices are not a silver bullet or Swiss Army Knife
• Architectural decision must be made after thorough evaluation
• Done wrongly, you will improve the throughput of 24/7 support team (daily fire fighting)
• It may make your boss having some sleepless nights
• Finally! Be creative in messing up
Messing Up Your Microservices

25. HAMBURG - SHANGHAI – SINGAPUR - ZÜRICH
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