As stated in the previous post, a side effect of designing a system using microservices is that you end up having tens and hundreds of services that you need to keep running. One challenge right there, especially when it comes down to critical systems with zero down-time policy, is that how do you ensure these microservices are operational?
Fortunately, the software development community has already established patterns such as Continuous Development, Continuous Delivery, Canary releases and Blue/Green deployment methods (Kargar & Hanifizade, 2018). Yet, there are two concerns:
- Does your organization already have these practices in place? There is a learning curve and organizational acceptance that takes time to establish these patterns. If these are not already well established, it is suggested that you start there first.
- Even when you already have these practices at your organisation level, how do you ensure the release has the required quality before you deploy it?
There are other challenges related to how microservices are deployed and are run, which is the subject of the next post.
References
Kargar, M. J., & Hanifizade, A. (2018, 25-26 April 2018). Automation of regression test in microservice architecture. 2018 4th International Conference on Web Research (ICWR)