Top 3 Challenges of Adopting Microservices as Part of Your Cloud Migration

Many organizations embark on cloud migrations to achieve scalability, cost-efficiency and higher application performance. IDC estimates 60 percent of worldwide enterprises are migrating existing applications to the cloud. With the promise of greater flexibility, a reduction in overhead and the potential for significant cost savings, it’s a logical decision. But instead of performing a “lift and shift”—simply moving an existing application to a cloud platform—many businesses use the migration period as an opportunity to modernize the architecture of their applications.

What’s more, in a survey by NGINX, over 70 percent of organizations say they’re adopting or exploring microservices for their new architectures—and with good reason. A complex name for what is relatively a simple concept, microservices refers to a concept whereby individual parts of an application are constructed as discrete, modular building blocks. Breaking a monolithic application into manageable microservices allows development teams to rapidly respond to an ever-evolving set of business requirements, choose the right technology stack for each task, and readily provide support for a variety of delivery platforms, including web, mobile, and native apps.

But with the great benefits that microservices bring, there are also some challenges that enterprises face as they look to adopt new concepts to maintain their competitive edge. In fact, adopting microservices as part of your cloud migration isn’t always easy. Below are three common challenges we’ve seen enterprises face, and solutions to help mitigate these risks.

Challenge 1: Identifying What Needs to be Migrated to Microservices

Before you can begin breaking your application out into individual microservices, you first need to understand its full scope and architecture. This can prove challenging, as many times the overarching view of the application is based on “tribal knowledge” or cobbled together from a collection of disparate tools. Sometimes a more holistic view may be available, but is based on outdated information that does not reflect the current architecture of the application.

Related Content:

DevOps in the Cloud: Security’s Groundhog Day

The Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring

You need to find a solution that will help you discover and map every component, dependency and third party call of your application. This solution should help you understand the relationship of these pieces and how each impacts your application’s behavior and user experience. Armed with this information, you’ll have a clear picture of what needs to be migrated and will be able to make more-informed decisions regarding the architecture of your microservices.

Challenge 2: Ensuring Your Microservices Meet or Beat Pre-Migration Performance

To ensure your application runs smoothly post-migration, and that user experience was not negatively impacted, you need a way to compare performance metrics from pre- and post-migration. This can be extremely difficult, as the architecture of these two environments (with the changes to hardware and the move to a distributed architecture) can look drastically different. To make things even more difficult, the monitoring tools supplied by individual hosting providers give insight into only a small portion of the entire architecture and have no way of creating a more holistic set of data.

To combat these issues and establish a consistent baseline by which to measure your performance and user experience, you will need to capture key user interactions (often referred to as business transactions), prior to beginning your migration. The business transactions are likely to remain the same through migration whereas other metrics may change as you take different code paths and deploy on different infrastructures. Armed with baseline data about your business transactions, you can easily compare the performance of your pre- and post-migration environments and ensure that there is no impact to your user experience or overall performance.

Challenge 3: Monitoring Your New Microservices Environment

With large, monolithic applications running a single codebase on a few pieces of hardware, two or three tools could once provide complete, straightforward monitoring of application and infrastructure performance. However, with the introduction of microservices and the potential for each service to implement its own solution for technology stack, database and hosting provider, a single service may now require a greater number of monitoring tools than the entire application once did. And microservice monitoring brings specific challenges: They are often short-lived, which means monitoring over a longer period of time can be more complicated, and there may be more pathways through which the service is reached, potentially exposing issues such as thread contention.

Finally, while development teams previously didn’t require a monitoring solution that took infrastructure into account, the move to DevOps and the reliance on cloud-native technologies means this factor can no longer be ignored.

Changes in consumer behavior and expectations have been the catalysts for large tech trends including cloud computing and mobile device adoption. While the change of pace can be dizzying for many, as the need for speed in application development is greater than ever before, cloud migration is possible. The goal for any business looking to successfully adopt microservices as a part of its cloud migration is to find a unified monitoring platform that supports all of your environments, regardless of language or technology stack. This solution must collate metrics from across your application and infrastructure into a single source of truth and allow for correlation of those metrics to user experience.

— Matt Chotin