Microservices — A recipe for burnout?

Microservices have been popular for quite a long time now. This topic may seem out dated, but maybe not?

Let me explain …

I have often seen companies jump on Microservices bandwagon as it is a popular and a proven pattern. Yes it is!

But for many companies, Devops culture is non-existent even today (amazing, right?). A good Devops culture is a prerequisite for Microservices.

Well, every company has a Devops team team these days. Devops is such an overloaded term! Existence of a Devops team does not automatically mean a Devops culture.

A good Devops culture promotes

• close collaboration between developers and operations folks
• CI/CD pipelines
• monitoring and alerting of applications and infrastructure (dashboards etc..)
• transparency (metrics etc..)
• support for auto recovery (when applications crash)
• centralized logging

What I see in many places is that most of this is missing. They generally have a Devops team who have access to the infrastructure and are tasked to either deploy manually or write basic pipelines to deploy to it. Nothing more. If an application is slow or is not responding, the user (or someone in services) raises the issue and the Devops person restarts the application.

When Microservices get introduced in such places, it is going to be excruciatingly painful for the development team.

Development team ends up deploying many applications manually or using pipelines (in the past, they were deploying a single application and it was simple and easy).

They find themselves responsible to check

• if each application (microservice) is up
• if the right version of the application is deployed to an environment
• troubleshoot errors using logs from different locations, while users are waiting for the fix.

This can easily lead to burnout as they end up spending significant amount of their time on these activities instead of building/maintaining features.

Don’t get me wrong here, in companies with good Devops culture, it is super fun to work on Microservices.

But if you don’t have this culture, stay away from Microservices for the sake of your developers!