When to Use Microservices: Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices

Editor's note: Microservices make updates and maintenance easier, and DevOps automation highlights this advantage, but they are not a silver bullet; the best tools do not guarantee the highest efficiency, and balancing in‑house development with external components is essential.

Microservices are currently very popular because they allow small applications to be integrated, enabling faster, more automated development cycles, better continuous delivery, and increased visibility into DevOps processes and deployments.

For developers and testers who prefer using the best‑of‑breed tools for each task, microservices let them connect many open‑source and commercial tools within the DevOps pipeline. However, some vendor‑provided integrations may not be fully customized, and asking vendors to build custom integrations can be costly and time‑consuming.

Consequently, development teams can build their own toolkits using microservices and integrate everything to achieve full visibility of the development process. Compared with legacy APIs, REST APIs are easy to work with, allowing developers to write microservices without specialized product knowledge.

Despite these advantages, there are notable drawbacks:

Hard to handle. Microservices depend on vendor APIs; when those change, services break and must be rebuilt from scratch, consuming significant time and diverting effort from new feature development, which raises costs and delays timelines.

Slapdash processes. Teams often rush microservice development, skipping steps that make services fragile. A vendor‑provided microservice must be robust for many customers, but internal integrations can still be prone to breakage, leading to domino effects and downtime.

To mitigate these issues, consider the following measures:

Evaluate the economics: determine whether developing microservices in‑house is cheaper (considering staff time) than relying on vendor solutions.

If cost is not the primary factor, weigh the benefits of a custom‑built DevOps toolstack against the added complexity and potential downtime risks.

Analyze business benefits thoroughly before committing to a microservice strategy.

Practical ways to reduce microservice complexity include:

Go hybrid: Combine vendor‑provided components with self‑developed microservices for a balanced approach.

Outsource: For mission‑critical applications, let an external development firm handle the microservice portion, reducing risk and freeing internal developers to focus on product building.

Tools and languages: Choose languages that work well with REST APIs, such as Python or Ruby, and leverage integration tools like Zapier or TaskTop. As organizations expand their use of microservices and containers, automated options are expected to grow.

Overall, microservices can greatly enhance DevOps efficiency, but teams must carefully assess costs, complexity, and maintenance overhead to determine the optimal adoption strategy.