When the Cracks Begin to Show

by Lucas Jellema

No one has achieved success with microservices just by talking about them. Unfortunately, many organizations spend a lot of time on exactly that, debating how to approach microservices. It is as though there is one perfect approach to designing and working with microservices that needs only be uncovered. In actual fact, there is no such definitive solution; even if there were, it would hold true only until changes in the organization, business objectives, technology frameworks and regulations made adjustments necessary.

It is tempting—just as it was a decade ago with SOA Web Services—to spend a lot of time and energy on identifying microservices. Creating an exhaustive overview of all microservices, defining the exact scope and interface of each, is not feasible and is not a smart investment of time. It would be a lot of work, and that work would never be complete. The definition of microservices is not an end in itself and giving in to this temptation represents a serious risk. Microservices are an instrument for achieving sustained business agility in a changing world of functional and non-functional requirements and evolving technical, political, economic, and legal parameters. Microservices cannot be defined once and for all, and they should not have to be. As architects and developers we are agile and flexible. We embrace change in all aspects of our IT organizations.

Here’s another organizational risk familiar from the SOA era: starting with an exclusive focus on the technology for implementing microservices and on the microservices platform, the underlying platform for eventually running the microservices (that do not even exist yet and for which no requirements are yet known). It is all too easy to spend time on this seemingly useful exercise and, after months of investigation and selection and architecting, to end up with an impractical, oversized and over-engineered platform – and no running microservices. Such discussions slow down the process of microservice adoption, obstruct the view of the essential challenges, and set up an organization for disappointing results (if not outright frustration).

A third category of risk is to just start building microservices without a clear business need for or objective with a microservice architecture or, even worse, without really understanding what a microservices architecture entails from an organizational perspective. The operative keyword being overlooked: DevOps.

This article provides some insights and guidelines that can help propel teams of architects beyond discussions and into action. Perhaps it can also help establish some architecture guidelines, such as the importance of domain design.

What do we want to achieve with microservices?

When discussing microservices, we must remember what our objectives are. Microservices are not the objective; they are merely the means. Microservices are meant to help us with those objectives and if they do not do so, we neither need nor want them.

Both in Development and in Operations we want to have better control and more insight so we can change functional and non-functional aspects as dictated by business needs. And we have the impression that microservice concepts and considerations will help us get there.

What is a microservice, anyway?

It’s a reasonable enough question to ask, but apparently it’s a tough one to answer. It seems easier to describe what the microservices architecture is intended for than to explicitly define a microservice itself. Perhaps we tend to stay away from a concrete definition because we find we are not so much in agreement with our peers as we thought we were. Let me try to describe the picture I see in my mind when talking about microservices:

A microservice is an independent business component that we can change, release, scale, relocate, make available, replace, charge for, report on and decide about, without dependencies on other microservices (and their associated teams, owners, users, etc.). A microservice has clear business value and implements a specific business capability. A microservice is owned through its entire DevOps/BusOps lifecycle by a single team of no more than 6-8 people. One team could own a few microservices; each service will fall under precisely one team.

The word “microservice” leads many people to assume microservices are much smaller than “regular” services. But, to me, one microservice can easily comprise several of our typical SOA (Web) Services. In my mind:

• Most organizations will have dozens of microservices, perhaps a few hundred in cases of extreme size or functional complexity; I do not envision thousands or more microservices in an organization.
• Microservices can (partly) be implemented through one or more serverless functions.
• Microservices can have (part of) a SaaS service or standard application at their core.
• Microservices will have to collaborate--by responding to each other's events or participating in workflows and transactions; ideally, however, they are not aware of each other, only of events and/or generic platform components.

Note: I find no clear connection between microservices and containers. Of course, containers are a great vehicle for achieving standardized and automated CI/CD, release, scaling and management, and allow us to package application and platform components together into standalone units; as such, they can be a great help for implementing microservices. At the same time, one microservice can easily be implemented using several containers or totally without using containers.

Comparison with departments in a company?

Microservices are designed from business functionality and responsibility (maximize cohesion vs. maximize decoupling), based on business domain decomposition. Microservices translate to technical stuff, such as deployment artifacts and containers and perhaps database schemas or partitions, and even more to organizational aspects, such as ownership, planning and budgeting, coordination and team management.

Microservices can be compared with departments in a company: relatively separate units with a clear responsibility that can be largely "encapsulated" and are interacted with in largely predefined ways that should not be bypassed by outsiders.

The size and number of departments and their scope is not easily defined in a generic manner. Some are small, some large. Some may consist of just a part timer (e.g., our legal department consists of a specialist hired for 6 hours per week) and others can be fairly large (the pool of truck drivers, for example). As the company grows or diversifies, the departments can be split into more specialized units.

At the departmental level or per department, it is decided how activities are performed, who is hired or fired, where activities are performed and when the department is available to perform work. Too many tiny departments can introduce a lot of overhead and very complex process chains, even though they may allow a high degree of specialization and flexibility. Departments that are too large are hard to manage and may adopt different ways of working. Creating two departments out of a single one or combining several departments into one unit is a fairly common practice, although it may not always be a very smooth transition.

Exploration of the bounded contexts that are the breeding ground for microservices takes place in a similar way as the above search for the optimal departmental structure: as part of domain-driven design. Citing Gérald Croës: "Bounded contexts are the Single Responsibility Principle applied to your domain model. Each part of your system has its intelligence, data, and vocabulary. Each part is independent of one another."

General guidelines

When defining microservices, some general guidelines override all other, more subjective considerations:

• A microservice can be fully taken care of by a single team.
• The (business) ownership of the microservice is clear—a single decision-making unit regarding both functionality and operational, non-functional requirements
• A microservice is stand-alone, independent of other microservices, both logically (design time dependencies) and physically
• The implementation of the microservice is encapsulated, known only to the team.
• The technology to implement the microservice is used at the discretion of the team, within certain limits: the microservice must be run on the generic enterprise infrastructure and at enterprise level (in order to reduce the list of skills the organization needs to maintain and facilitate collaboration between teams and the movement of employees across teams). A portfolio of allowed technologies can be defined from which teams can choose. However, restrictions with respect to the implementation technology should be limited as these may have a negative impact on the team's motivation and sense of ownership, the development of the microservice, as well as its runtime stability and future maintainability.
• The implementation of a microservice is simple and straightforward: easy to change, easy to understand for existing and new team members, and not requiring the acquisition of too many skills in order to collaborate on the team (so the technology stack should be limited).
• The microservice should provide clear business value and deliver well-defined business functionality (if we cannot explain to non-IT staff what a microservice is for, we should reconsider its very existence).
• A microservice exists within a single bounded context.
• A microservice can be owner of specific business data and also make use of data it does not own. Data owned by the microservice can be queried or manipulated only through the microservice. Data in the bounded context of which the microservice is not the owner is read-only to the microservice; a local copy can be synchronized from the owning microservice.
• A single, unified enterprise data model and a single, one-stop database with all enterprise data are not desirable and are in contrast with microservice principles. Eventual consistence across microservices (and across the data stores owned by microservices) is the common situation. ACID (cross-bounded context transaction with immediate consistency) is implemented only when it is truly required and well-motivated from business requirements. Data duplication is not considered a bad thing, although the ownership of data (the single point of truth) should always be clear. Note: even within a bounded context or microservice it might be wise to explicitly mark transactions that require ACID processing, even if for the moment such processing may seem free because a relational database is used for persistency.

As Sam Newman states: "When it comes to how small is small enough, I like to think in these terms: the smaller the service, the more you maximize the benefits and downsides of microservice architecture. As you get smaller, the benefits around interdependence increase. But so too does some of the complexity that emerges from having more and more moving parts. As you get better at handling this complexity, you can strive for smaller and smaller services." (Building Microservices, by Sam Newman, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2016, ISBN: 1491950358)

Starting a new microservice: why and when?

Two application sections that are currently part of the same microservice (or monolith) are perhaps better off in distinct microservices if they have stark differences in one or more characteristics, to such an extent that it hampers us or cramps our style. Some measures and mechanisms are expensive, so they should not be wasted on application areas that do not require them. Making functionality Highly Available or Ultra Secure or Supremely Well Tested comes at a price. Identifying areas that need special measures and isolating them as separate components (i.e., microservices) to ensure the elevated levels are focused and applied only where needed is one of the considerations.

The motivation for breaking off a chunk from an existing application component should be the fact that the chunk is currently not (in) a separate microservice makes it harder or more expensive to do things we want to do to only one of them, such as make functional changes, improve availability, test for regression, set up monitoring, train developers, or achieve high level of confidentiality. Therefore, we branch off one or more microservices to remove these limitations that we experience. The effort of branching off and the overhead introduced as a result of having two or more microservices instead of a single microservice is justified by the gains from the independence we realize between the microservices. Otherwise, we don’t do it.

Characteristics that drive the decision to extract one or more microservices from an existing component (when various areas within a component hugely differ in them):

Business

• Lack of functional] cohesion: a microservice should concern itself with a single responsibility (again the Single Responsibility Principle); if a microservice is found to be doing multiple, unrelated things, then it should be split up.
• Rate of change: if two areas have a very different change rate (e.g., one is stable, almost static, and the other is constantly on the move), they probably should be taken apart; for one, the testing and CD effort will be unnecessarily large if we constantly process a subdomain that does not change.
• Dependencies: if two areas have no mutual dependencies, why should they be in the same microservice? If they have very different external dependencies, these dependencies may have too broad an impact (impacting a subdomain that has no need for them).
• Business value and criticality level (a specialization of the previous bullet): if one area in a component is critical to the daily operation of a business, and another area is much more mundane, they will have to be treated in very different ways—certainly in terms of Operations; that may be a reason for identifying two different microservices.
• Usages and user communities, business domain, terminology: when the usage patterns, or simply the group of users for two subdomains, are very different from each other, or very different domain knowledge is required, it may well be that two teams with different cultures, communication styles and functional and technical attitudes are required; different teams implies different microservices.

Organization

• Ownership and decision process: if the way in which the evolution and priorities for two areas is decided is very different, it may be a problem for at least one of them if their lifecycle is intimately linked in a single microservice; time to say goodbye?
• Budget and funding: similar and related to the previous characteristic, if the way the Dev and Ops of two areas are funded is very different, this may be prohibitive to the evolution of one or both.
• Size and complexity: reasons for considering multiple teams and [therefore] multiple microservices include if one team (around 8 people) is not enough to take proper care of the current component, or if one specific area in a component is very complex and requires highly specialized training and skills to work on.

Architecture, technology, non-functionality

• CD process requirements, including QA demands: if part of a component requires a very stringent QA process (e.g., various levels of testing and approval and an extreme degree of automated regression testing) while a different part can be extremely relaxed, the evolution of the second part can be unnecessarily slowed down and made more complex and expensive until it is split off.
• Technology and skillset: when two areas require very different technologies and skillsets to be developed and operated, it may put a too large burden on a single team; this can be resolved by having two teams (or by standardizing on a common, more narrow stack).
• Security level: if one area requires very advanced confidentiality and rather extreme security measures while a different area does not, the cost (not just financially, but also in complexity of changing, testing and managing) of having specialized resources for the entire component instead of for only a subdomain may be prohibitive, and splitting the special-needs microservice from the component may be in order.
• Massive interaction and/or shared transaction scope: if two areas have frequent interactions or perform activities that are logically and perhaps physically part of the same transaction, that may be a reason for not breaking them up. As stated, interactions across microservice boundaries are more complex and certainly introduce runtime overhead; logical transactions across microservice boundaries even further increase the complexity and overhead.
• Billing: usage for different areas in a component is charged for in very different ways, and could be based on different metrics, different types of subscriptions, at very different price levels, to very different users or departments.

Operational

• Sizing, scale and [dynamic] scalability requirements: if we have to significantly scale a component because one area within that component has severe scalability requirements, we are allocating resources to scaling other areas that have far more relaxed scalability needs; this can become very wasteful, and a driver for breaking the different areas apart.
• Availability requirements: similar to the previous discussion on scale, if one area has very advanced H/A requirements and another does not, the effort of implementing H/A for the entire component, through compute resources and people, will partly be redundant.

How to deal with change

There is no perfect microservices design and certainly not one that will remain a perfect fit forever. Organizations are in constant flux, as is the world around them. What was a great fit yesterday in terms of microservices may no longer match the situation of tomorrow. We might as well face that we do not design for posterity and instead embrace the changes and refactor our microservices accordingly.

Change is the only constant, so let's embrace change

The Agile way of working and thinking mandates us to embrace change—change with regard to functionality and priorities and also with respect to technology, process and architecture. This mentality needs to be spread throughout the complete organization from the C-Level down to the clerks in the business departments. This critical aspect is not often seen in organizations.

We should be prepared to modify our microservices design when the situation changes, and be happy for the chance to improve instead of chagrined that our design apparently was not good enough. This can happen, for example, when the decision is made to implement a SaaS service, to outsource part of the business activities, to implement specific security considerations regarding certain types of data, or to merge the organization and its IT assets with another company—or simply when the organization is successful and is growing rapidly.

Refactor microservices: split and (rarely) merge

We should be prepared almost at any time to extract newly identified microservices from an existing application component. When the cracks revealing a candidate microservice begin to show and a certain subset of an existing application component or microservice is found to meaningfully differ from the larger context it lives in (e.g., on one or more of the characteristics listed above), we have to split off that subset as a new microservice.

This will happen so regularly that organizations should have no difficulty going through this process. Given that we will start out with one or very few microservices, it is likely that we will have to split off microservices regularly. We can facilitate that process by preparing for it; just as in the figure above, we should define and visualize the boundaries between subdomains so there is awareness in our team about the areas that, though part of a single entity, should be treated as at least a little separate from each other. We should assign names to these subdomains and use those names in user stories, documentation and in the naming conventions for our software artefacts. Interactions within the microservices and across the border between the subdomains should be created in a considered manner: whenever possible, through the public channel (API or, better yet, events) or at least all through a single interface. There should be no direct references or dependencies between data models in the subdomains.

The biggest challenge with splitting microservices is data. It’s easier to split off code than it is to split data, both the data model and the actual data records. Once data is split, the way transactions are supported must also be reconsidered, at least if transactions were supported across the boundary where we now have two microservices. The transaction design perhaps should be changed, or patterns like SAGA and Event Sourcing must be considered.

Note: The reverse operation of merging two microservices into a single component should be much easier. Formerly heavily decoupled components with disjunct ownership, backlogs and budgets are combined into a single unit with permission—but no mandate—to interact more intimately. In reality, merging mature microservices does not happen very often; a merge will be considered only when there is no justification for having two separate microservices and when the short-term effort to merge is less than the long-term overhead of continuing with the existing situation. Unfortunately, the risk and effort are typically not justified since there is no immediately apparent gain from merging. By having and practicing a clear procedure for merging microservices, just as we have for splitting them, we get closer to embracing change and can get a better fit for the microservices with our organization.

Example: the subdomains in a web shop's logistics microservice

Here’s a simple example: a small organization runs a web shop. Its application landscape has been designed based on the functionality required, the SaaS services subscribed to, the structure of the organization and the user groups. The size of the outfit is also a factor: the IT department is currently very small and the scale of the operation is very limited.

However, it is clear from the beginning that the logistics microservice comprises areas of functionality that are related but distinct as well. Warehousing (keeping track of the stock and ensuring that replenishment is done from vendors and) Shipping (picking orders up from the warehouse and transferring them to shipping partners for delivery to customers) are both part of Logistics. They have touchpoints and definitely deal with similar aspects of the business, yet they are different.

It is too early for this organization to break up the Logistics domain into Warehousing and Shipping (and more?), but it makes sense to recognize the separate areas that may well evolve into distinct microservices. We do this by associating user stories, documentation, software artefacts, etc., explicitly with their respective sub-domains when naming and organizing them. Additionally, we try to prevent any direct dependencies between artefacts from these two subdomains. The data models should be kept separate. Interactions between the two subdomains should be explicitly managed, documented and implemented, ideally through external APIs and events.

In the same organization, a similar example is provided by the Orders and Shopping Cart. Right now, they not only share one bounded context but they are also implemented in a single service. However, chances are that Ordering and Shopping Cart will evolve separately and change for different reasons. They may eventually become separate services—and perhaps distinct bounded contexts. We will then have to consider the split in data and define events so the two pieces of functionality can still interoperate. even though now they’re fully decoupled.

Fewer microservices is better

The fewer microservices we need to achieve our true objective, the better it is. More microservices means more overhead and costs; in terms of organizational responsibilities and work coordination; complexity and administration effort (cross-domain transactions, more moving parts to oversee, monitor); resource usage (each microservice requires additional infrastructure resources); and performance (highly decoupled interactions across microservices will take considerably longer in terms of network latency than internal calls within a microservice).

If one microservice could bring us all we need, that would be great! One component that does it all: is that therefore a monolith? Well, literally it is. But it should not have the challenges commonly associated with monoliths (such as hard to scale, hard to change), or it would be broken up into multiple microservices.

In reality, in most situations our application landscape will be heterogeneous along various axes and too big to be taken care of by a single team. Because of relevant differences between various areas in our application landscape, we might entertain the thought of splitting off some areas as microservices. Ultimately, it is the functional design—translating to bounded contexts—that probably is the biggest deciding factor in designing the microservices and therefore the eventual granularity.

Note: an interesting discussion can be held around the distinction between bounded context (an area of shared, consistent business terminology and data model language along with all persistent data stores, aligned with a business sub domain) and microservice. We could argue that several microservices (with, e.g., different scalability requirements) can be created within one bounded context. In terms of business responsibility and DevOps ownership, ideally the bounded context is not split up and if there are in fact multiple microservices for pragmatic reasons, they should all be owned by the same team.

Acknowledgments

Suggestions, contributions and general feedback from the following people have made this a better article, and I thank them for it: Jeroen Kooij, Luis Weir, Sven Bernhardt, Michiel van der Sluis, and Sander Rosenhart.

Resources

[1] Building Microservices, by Sam Newman, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2016, ISBN: 1491950358
http://gorodinski.com/blog/2013/04/29/sub-domains-and-bounded-contexts-in-domain-driven-design-ddd/ [2] “Sub-domains and Bounded Contexts in Domain-Driven Design (DDD)” by Lev Gorodinski , April 2013 - http://gorodinski.com/blog/2013/04/29/sub-domains-and-bounded-contexts-in-domain-driven-design-ddd/
[3] “How big is a microservice?” by Ben Morris, March 2015 - http://www.ben-morris.com/how-big-is-a-microservice/
[4] “Thoughts on the macro architecture and the infrastructure for microservices” by Michael Douglas, April 2018 - https://medium.freecodecamp.org/microservices-from-idea-to-starting-line-ae5317a6ff02

About the Author

Lucas Jellema is solution architect and CTO at AMIS, based in the Netherlands. He works as a consultant, architect, and instructor in such diverse areas as Database and SQL, Java/Java EE, SOA/BPM and PaaS and SaaS Cloud Solutions. The running theme through most of his activities is the transfer of knowledge and enthusiasm (and live demos). An Oracle ACE Director and Developer Champion, Lucas is a well-known speaker at Oracle Code, Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, Devoxx and various User Group conferences around the world. His articles have appeared on Oracle Developer Community, the AMIS Technology weblog and in magazines and websites around the world. Lucas is the author of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook (2010, McGraw Hill) and Oracle SOA Suite 12c Handbook (2015, McGraw Hill)