Stop Paying the “Microservice Premium”

A Solution to the Microservice Deployment/Distribution Trade-Off

When evaluating microservices as a candidate architecture, the most important factor to consider is that the end result is a distributed application. Microservices are the components of distributed applications — and distribution is what enables their chief virtue, deployment independence. Unfortunately, relative to the traditional alternative, pejoratively called “monoliths”, distributed apps are much harder to build and manage. So much so, that many microservice implementations fail.

This trade-off — putting up with increased scope, cost and risk that distributed systems impose, in order to reap the benefits of a microservice-style deployment — is called paying the microservice premium. Sometimes the premium is well worth it, especially for more complex apps; but in many cases it does more harm than good, leading experts to advise against starting with microservices, but to instead introduce them gradually as complexity or volume increases.

That said, in cases where the implementation does succeed, organizations generally prefer microservices to monoliths because of the increased velocity and agility that deployment autonomy brings. So one could make the argument that if this premium were somehow discounted…