Voxxed Days Vienna 2018

In technology we don’t always stop to understand the pros and cons of each big new thing.
There is a minimum level of complexity inherent in every system before we write a line of code. By using microservices we cannot reduce this minimum complexity, we can only move it around. Are we happy to accept that we might achieve reduced complexity in components for increased complexity in orchestration?
I’ve worked on three large microservices projects in the past 18 months which have all had different approaches to orchestration. In certain cases the outcomes enabled by a microservices architecture were swamped by the complexity of orchestration of both the runtimes and the paths to production. In addition to added complexity many developers find it very difficult to reason with flows that rely on asynchronous messaging.
So are microservices really worth the trouble? They can deliver some great outcomes but it is important to understand the costs that these outcomes carry and the skills that you’ll need in your development teams to make them worthwhile. I will explain the key tradeoffs that need to be understood before you jump off the microservices cliff.