Microservices: The Benefits and Costs

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Graham Lea

'Mycenaean Bronze Scales' - a set of ancient, bronze scales. Any tech team should weigh microservices benefits against their costs before deciding whether to make the switch. Photographed by Mark Cartwright.

If you work in tech, you’ve almost definitely heard about microservices: the trendy style of software architecture where a system is split into multiple, independently-releasable services, that are modelled around business domains, and communicate via a network. Some people rave about all the amazing things they’ve achieved by using microservices’ benefits. Others rant about how much of their time it wastes and how much they hate it.

Like pretty much everything in tech, microservice architecture is a trade-off. Will it do great things for your organisation or not? That depends largely on how well set up you are to take advantage of the benefits and to absorb the costs.

Microservice Architecture is a trade-off. Whether it's going to do great things for your organisation depends on how well set up you are to take advantage of the benefits and absorb the costs. Read more: Microservices: The Benefits and Costs Click To Tweet

If you’re looking to make a decision about whether to use microservices in your team (or reverse one!), here’s a list of many of the pros and cons which you’ll want to consider.

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Using Microservices to Make Costly Deployments Less Frequent

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Graham Lea

This article on costly deployments is part of a series on How to Choose Your First Microservices.

Switching to a new software architecture style is costly. I advocate choosing where to employ microservices first by using them to solve existing problems in the team. This helps the organisation extract value from the new architecture with each step towards the new world. This series is working through a set of problems that your org may have, and how microservices might help solve them.

Tricky Deployments

A fighter jet on an aircraft carrier being signalled to launch by two ground staff. Launching a fighter jet is a costly deployment, just as deploying a monolith may be.

Some components of your system will be tricker to deploy than others. This is true regardless of whether you’ve already got microservices or you’re deploying a monolith. Some components might be in use by 1000s of customers 24×7, while others might only be used once a month. Upgrading a component might require other components to be placed into a certain state, while others can be upgraded independently of the rest of the system. Coordination may be required between multiple teams in order to effect a trouble-free deploy of some components, whereas others might be actioned by a single person.

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Using Microservices to Solve Developers Stepping on Each Other’s Toes

Posted on July 3, 2019 by Graham Lea

This article on reducing merge conflicts is part of a series on How to Choose Your First Microservices.

Is your team wasting a lot of time working around each other?

A side-collision car crash at an intersection, surrounded by emergency personnel. Like this, merge conflicts can be messy and dangerous.

If you have a large team of developers working in a single code base, it’s inevitable that the work of some team members will interfere with the work of others. Many of us are now using tools (like git) and processes (like continuous integration) that can lessen the impact of interference. (Although other modern practices like feature branching can make conflicts worse.)

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Using Microservices to Solve Slow Build Times

Posted on June 29, 2019 by Graham Lea

This article on slow build times is part of a series on How to Choose Your First Microservices.

Slow Build Times?

A snail crossing a road, which might happen faster your slow build time.

Does your team have an application that takes a long time to build and run tests? Is a large portion of the development team working on it? That could be a huge amount of idle time you’re pouring down the drain. The classic XKCD ‘Compiling’ comic makes light of developers enjoying the time they spend waiting for their code to build. The truth for most devs is they would far prefer to be making fast progress on their work than sitting around waiting.

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How to Choose Your First Microservices

Posted on June 27, 2019 by Graham Lea

Are you early in your microservices journey? Maybe you’ve decided you need to start deploying applications outside your monolith but you haven’t cut any code yet. Or maybe you’ve put your first few services into production and addressed some of the first pains that happen when you start on that path.

A large number of interacting LEGO cogs making one large machine, similar to a monolith from which you want to break out your first microservices

A common question that comes up for teams at around this time is:

“What should we split out into a microservice first?

And why?”

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Feature Flags and Test-Driven Design: Some Practical Tips

Posted on May 31, 2019 by Graham Lea

In 2018, our team spent a lot of time working with feature flags and test-driven design (TDD).

Our project was to effect an architectural change to our system, changing the source of truth of some data, moving it out of the database owned by a legacy monolith into a new database controlled by a new microservice. However, much of the code requiring the data would remain in the monolith.*

Some examples of the types of things we feature-flagged are:

- whether to go down a refactored code path or not;
- whether to publish messages to a message queue when a certain event occurred;
- how to publish those messages (we tried multiple variations of batching and transaction boundaries to achieve acceptable performance);
- whether to just delete messages at the receiving end or actually handle them; and
- whether to use a local source of data or remote one.

We were working on a pretty important piece of code; the kind of business function where, if we stuffed it up, someone would probably have to spend several days doing remedial fixups or making phone calls to chase up millions of dollars. Continue reading →

Time to Evolve Again

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Graham Lea

My mid-2000s, fresh-faced, professional look from around the time I joined Tyro.

After 12.3 years, yesterday was my last day at @Tyro. 😢

It’s been a huge journey, from a perilous payments startup with less than 20 employees and only ☝🏻 customer, to now a VC-backed, fully-licensed bank with well over 400 staff that is Australia’s 5th largest EFTPOS provider (by transaction volume).

I’ve done time as a Software Engineer, Development Lead, Engineering Lead (part of the management team), Technical Project Manager, Team Lead, Product Lead, and this last year, back to Software Engineer. I must have hired 50+ (awesome) people and interviewed many times that.

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“This work kinda sucks right now”: Staying motivated in the uninspiring phases of long projects

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Graham Lea

In April 2015, I was the technical project manager of six software teams all working on one gigantic project. It was the biggest challenge the company had ever taken on. The goal: create and stand up a transaction account product for small and medium business so that we could apply for an unrestricted bank license.

We were 12 months in and were about to finish the project bang on the week we’d estimated, when the inevitable happened: we received a new raft of requirements that would add at least another 3 months of work. The extra work wasn’t glamorous; it was mostly security enhancements, disaster recovery preparation, and a complicated behind-the-scenes tweak of the product that added little benefit for users but was a requirement from a regulatory point of view.

Understandably, morale took a hit, but we needed to keep the pace up or we’d risk missing the deadline we’d been set for acquiring our license. After an interesting discussion with my father-in-law about the project, I found a new perspective on where we were at, and it prompted me to write the internal blog below to help motivate the team towards our final goal. Continue reading →

9 fascinating things I learned while coding up the rules of a board game

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Graham Lea

I recently decided I was going to take the rules of the board game Forbidden Island and write them up as code.

I guess that sounds like a weird thing to just decide to do, doesn’t it? It’s actually one part of a bigger goal I have at the moment of teaching myself some practical machine learning. As part of this journey, I heard a great idea from YouTuber Jabrils to set yourself a significant challenge that you’re interested in, and to work towards surmounting that challenge. For Jabrils, his challenge was getting an AI to control a Forrest Gump character to run around a course in a game. For my challenge, I’ve decided I’d like to build an AI that can play Forbidden Island. (And win!)

Obviously, if you’re going to have an AI play a game, you first need a digital version of the game for the AI to play. Continue reading →

The Amazing Benefits of Exercism

Posted on April 28, 2018 by Graham Lea

A couple of months ago, a good friend at work (@rodeoclownII) sent out an email (or blog, or Slack message, or something) about exercism.io. It’s a cool little website for practising programming in various languages (currently about 45) by implementing koans, or small exercise problems.

I’ve been working through the Kotlin problems since the start of the year and I’ve found it super useful, so I thought I’d write this quick blog to recommend it to others.

Why I like exercism.io so much

Actor Anthony Hopkins seemingly performing an exorcism with the words "Back to hell, demon!" Probably unrelated to exercism.io

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about this kind of exorcism.

The most obvious benefit of this site is the opportunity to practise using different elements of the Kotlin language and standard library. Being challenged to solve problems which you might not necessarily come across during day-to-day work can lead you to discover parts of Kotlin that are really useful but which you otherwise might not have found a need to go looking for. Also, the problems are all implemented in a test-driven way, which feels very natural for me as a long-time practitioner of Extreme Programming/TDD. Continue reading →