Adopting a microservices architecture brings incredible benefits around flexibility, scalability, and faster release velocity. However, the complexity of managing dozens or hundreds of distinct services can overwhelm development teams lacking specific microservices expertise. This is especially true as applications grow, making early design decisions difficult to undo. Carefully selecting an experienced microservices development company early in the process becomes critical to long-term success in scaling distributed applications. Let’s explore key considerations around microservice partnerships.
Perks Of Collaborating With A Microservices Development Company:
Engaging an outside microservices software development company from project inception works well, offering external expertise plus extra capacity to augment in-house staff. Core advantages gained from working with dedicated microservices specialists include:
- Faster resolutions navigating common pitfalls teams new to microservices encounter
- Skills mentoring and best practice knowledge transfer to level up internal developers through pair programming
- Objective guidance on appropriately sizing services for separation of concerns and rolling back unhealthy consolidations before late
- Assistance benchmarking and stress testing to validate the feasibility of strategic technical choices around languages, data tiers, queues, or caching
- Prototyping alternative approaches to complex workflows and identifying the simplest viable solutions
- Building instrumentation and logging best suited for monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems at scale
- Delivering production-ready reference architectures and templated configurations accelerates development sprints
- Providing DevOps release pipelines designed securely for automated CI/CD across fragmented components
- Architectural oversight tailored to align infrastructure decisions with current and future microservices at a larger portfolio scope
Core Microservices Development Skills:
Given the inherently complex nature of managing dozens of discrete yet interconnected microservices, partner with specialists that bring deep hands-on expertise around:
- Decomposing monoliths into appropriately segmented domains of logic while avoiding typical anti-patterns
- Building message-oriented choreography and event-driven architectures using asynchronous queues
- Mapping domain models into specialized, bounded contexts aligned to microservice boundaries
- Optimizing stateless services for horizontal scaling and resilience patterns rather than fragile shared data stores
- Implementing API gateways, sidecars, service meshes, and proxies is essential for microservices communication
- Containerizing services through Docker Swarm or Kubernetes for simplified deployment portability
- Automating provisioning, secrets management, auto-scaling, and blue/green deployments
- Visualizing interactions between services to detect issues before user impact
- Tracing requests across services when troubleshooting using distributed tracing identifiers
- Proactively monitoring infrastructure and services using time series metrics and logs
- Providing DevOps CI/CD release pipelines scaled for independent deployments
Avoid Needless Microservices Complexity:
While microservices enable unprecedented scale via extreme service decomposition, unnecessary complexity causes problems. Ensure potential microservices partners demonstrate restraint, not blind ambition, around driving service counts too high or too early.
The right specialists guide customers to appropriate levels of service segmentation for given workloads, factoring in team maturity, grappling with distributed systems, and longer-term enterprise needs. They avoid dogmatic adherence to microservices for the sake of microservices, especially on less strategic applications or during early transitional phases when migrating monolithic codebases.
Choose microservices development teams that pragmatically decompose functionality aligned to organizational contexts without overengineering. They architect future scale once legacy constraints are removed, but postpone concepts that are not yet essential. Balance occurs when microservices enable business capabilities rather than dictate capabilities that businesses must bend to enable microservices.
Microservices Partners Invested In Your Developers:
Beyond supplementing temporary capacity or producing initial Microservices architectures, the right microservices partner stays invested in permanently up-leveling internal developer skills around the building, deploying, and operating distributed applications.
This means knowledge transfer occurs in parallel, not deferring education until after external consultants depart. Through paired programming, code reviews, reusable templates, and side-by-side mentoring during enhancements, internal teams organically adopt modern microservices techniques for long-term gains.
Ensure candidate partners express genuine commitment to sharing methodologies and best practices without reservations. This transfers institutional knowledge so your developers gain autonomy over creating, expanding, and supporting microservices aligned to future organizational requirements.
Governance Concerns Around Microservices:
As microservices portfolios scale exponentially, even minor inconsistencies or knowledge gaps risk major downstream consequences, degrading productivity. Carefully constructed governance and guidance policies managed by central architecture teams prevent otherwise inevitable entropy.
Governance Areas
- Standardized patterns for infrastructure provisioning and deployment
- Common languages, frameworks, data stores, and messaging platforms
- Consistent approaches to instrumenting, logging, and monitoring
- Shared libraries and code constructs enforce uniformity
- Reference architectures and template services accelerate the development of
- Automated policy enforcement engrained in pipelines early
- Mandatory peer reviews and architecture oversight on all major projects
- Ongoing education and expanding team skills
Leverage development partners intimately familiar with building guardrails for microservices sprawl through proven governance models. Ensure they instill governance thinking early through kickoffs, design sessions, and interim code reviews. Proactive governance prevents certain maintenance nightmares as systems scale.
Prioritize Security Reviews With External Partners:
Distributed microservices and hybrid/multi-cloud environments exponentially grow attack surfaces. Regularly injecting external security viewpoints becomes essential to discovering otherwise overlooked vulnerabilities before exploitation.
Consider mandating periodic penetration testing, architecture reviews, and code audits by outside microservices security specialists across all stages of development cycles – from design through post-production. Fresh eyes assess what overtaxed internal teams may wrongly assume as adequately protected in the rush to continuously deliver features.
Make security assessments success criteria on par with functional requirements. Bake security testing fees into project budgeting for proactive regular evaluation from unbiased external firms not influenced by internal political pressures. Ensure security auditors hold strong cloud architecture and microservices security credentials – capable of evaluating niche exposure risks specific to distributed applications.
Cyber threats evolve rapidly. Microservices teams focused day to day on application feature delivery often miss emerging infrastructure and platform-level risks outside their immediate roles. Unbiased external security experts fill knowledge, skill, and objectivity gaps – delivering high-integrity vulnerability and risk assessments focused on protecting customer and organizational data assets.
Conclusion:
Seasoned microservices practitioners guide customers away from predictable missteps through proven architecture patterns, reference implementations, and mentoring – not repeating others’ mistakes and making similar transitions in isolation. They enforce simplicity, resilience, and uniformity through positive architectural influence.
Choose partners that demonstrate patience – resisting the temptation to overly engineer service fractures before the paradigm fully solidifies across the broader organization. Allow patterns to emerge and skills to deepen before attempting to scale practices unsustainable by current team capabilities.
