How to address the complexities of Micro services Architecture

What is Micro services Architecture?
Micro services Architecture is a software architecture pattern that structures an application as a collection of small, independent services that are each responsible for a specific business capability. Each of these services are developed, deployed, and maintained independently and can be scaled up or down depending on the demand. Micro services Architecture enables organizations to develop, deploy, and maintain applications more quickly and efficiently due to its modular nature.

What are the uses cases for Micro services Architecture?

1. Improved scalability: Micro services architecture enables developers to scale specific components of an application independently, allowing them to quickly and efficiently increase capacity in one area without having to rewrite the entire codebase.
2. Faster development cycles: By breaking down a complex application into smaller, independent services, development teams can quickly identify and fix bugs without having to make changes across the entire codebase. This helps improve the speed of development cycles.
3. Increased reliability: By separating services into smaller units, any failures or errors that occur in one service can be isolated and fixed without impacting the rest of the system. This helps increase overall system reliability.
4. Increased flexibility: With micro services architecture, developers are able to use different programming languages and technologies for different services, making  it easier to customize and tailor services to specific needs.
5. Improved maintainability: By separating services into smaller, independent units, it becomes easier to maintain and update the system over time. This helps reduce the risk of introducing new bugs or issues during maintenance.

Pros & Cons of Micro services Architecture
Pros:

1. Scalability - It’s easier to scale micro services than a monolithic application because each service is deployed separately, so it can be scaled up or down independently.
2. Flexibility - Each micro service can be written in different programming languages, allowing for more flexibility when developing an application.
3. Resilience - If one of the services fails, the other services are not affected and the application can continue to run without any disruption.
4. Cost Efficiency - Micro services are cost-efficient since they are smaller and require fewer resources to develop and deploy than a monolithic application.

Cons:

1. Increased Complexity - Because of its distributed nature, micro services can be more complex than a monolithic architecture and  require more sophisticated infrastructure.
2. More Resources Needed - Micro services require more resources due to the larger number of components and services that need to be managed and monitored.
3. Troubleshooting Difficulties - Identifying the root cause of a problem in a distributed system can be difficult since it requires tracing requests across multiple services.

How to address the complexities of Micro services Architecture?

1. Make sure that there is clear communication and collaboration between teams: Ensure that all teams are communicating regularly and have a clear understanding of the architecture and their individual roles.
2. Implement a service registry: A service registry will enable each team to discover services available in the system, which will help to reduce communication overhead.
3. Use an API Gateway: An API gateway will enable services to communicate with each other securely and efficiently, reducing the need for complex inter-service communication.
4. Set up automated testing: Automated testing can help ensure that changes don’t break existing services and functions, reducing the risk of introducing bugs into the system.
5. Deploy services using containers: Containers provide an isolated environment for running applications, meaning different  teams can work on different services without impacting each other.
6. Monitor your services: Monitor the performance of your services and track any errors or issues to help identify and fix problems quickly.

Best practices for identifying the root causes and tracing the issues in a micro services based distributed architecture

1. Establish a centralized logging system: Implementing a centralized logging system across all micro services is essential for quickly identifying and tracing issues in a distributed architecture. This can be done by using log aggregation tools such as ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) or Splunk.
2. Use distributed tracing: With distributed tracing, each service request is given an ID that is passed along with it as it traverses through different services. This makes it easier to trace the flow of requests and identify the root cause of any issue. Tools like Zipkin, Jaeger, and OpenTracing are often used for this purpose.
3. Set up health checks: It’s important to set up health checks to ensure that all services are functioning as expected. If a service is not working properly, it can be quickly identified and fixed by checking the health check endpoint.
4. Monitor key metrics: Monitoring key metrics like response times, latency, error rates, etc. can help identify any potential issues in the system. This can be done by using monitoring tools like Datadog or Prometheus.
5. Implement chaos engineering: Chaos engineering is a technique that helps to identify weaknesses in the system by running experiments that simulate real-world conditions. Tools like Netflix’s Chaos Monkey or Gremlin can be used for this purpose.

By following these best practices, it is possible to quickly identify and trace issues in a micro services based distributed architecture.