It is important to understand the resulting ecosystem from the microservice architecture implementation. The impact of microservices is not just preoperational in nature. So profound will the changes in any organization opting for the microservice architecture be that, if they are not well-prepared to handle it, it won't be long before advantages turn into disadvantages.
After the adoption of the microservice architecture is agreed upon, it would be wise to have the following prerequisites in place:
- Deployment and QA: Requirements will become more demanding, with a quicker turnaround from development requirements. It would require you to deploy and test as quickly as possible. If it is just a small number of services, then it would not be a problem. However, if the number of services is going up, it could very quickly challenge the existing infrastructure and practices. For example, your QA and staging environment may no longer suffice to test the number of builds that would come back from the development team.
- A collaboration platform for the development and operations team: As the application goes to the public domain, it won't be long before the age-old script of dev versus QA is played out again. The difference this time would be that the business will be at stake. So, you need to be prepared to quickly respond in an automated manner to identify the root cause when required.
- A monitoring framework: With the increasing number of microservices, you would quickly need a way to monitor the functioning and health of the entire system for any possible bottlenecks or issues. Without any means of monitoring the status of the deployed microservices and the resultant business function, it would be impossible for any team to take a proactive deployment approach.