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Watch NowWith vFunction’s microservices governance, you can regain control of your distributed applications: Visualize your architecture, monitor drift, identify complex flows, and enforce patterns to prevent sprawl. Stop complexity in its tracks and ensure your applications stay resilient, scalable, and manageable—release after release.
At what point do microservices become too difficult to manage—20, 100, 500, or more? Without strong governance, teams face escalating challenges in documenting the actual architecture, and understanding its flows which eventually result in service sprawl, latency, and even downtime.
Microservices are typically separated into roles like API, core, and data services, but as they’re shared across applications, boundaries blur, causing confusion and a loss of control over changes and their impact.
Rapid release cycles and independently managed microservices make manually generated architecture or static code analysis diagrams quickly incomplete and obsolete.
Lack of visibility into service interactions, can lead to unintended circular dependencies or inefficient “spaghetti flows,” causing bottlenecks, latency and unintended complexity.
Troubleshooting distributed applications can stem from hidden dependencies and intricate service flows that complicate tracing, as services may create circular dependencies or rely on inefficient, multi-hop communication.
In fast-paced development environments, speed and agility often take priority over compliance with standards and policies. AI-generated microservices code exacerbates this problem. With vFunction, you can easily set architecture rules and patterns for individual services or groups to create essential guardrails that prevent sprawl, complexity, and technical debt.
One of the key benefits of microservices architecture is the ability to release software frequently. However, service catalogs—often manually updated—don’t provide a real-time view of the system. vFunction continuously generates accurate documentation from the working system. It visualizes service and resource dependencies, along with sequence diagrams of every possible system flow, ensuring an up-to-date, easy-to-understand view of your architecture.
In a well-architected application, services maintain logical roles and follow clear boundaries, such as API, core, and data services. However, as more services are deployed, these boundaries can blur as services are shared, making it difficult to determine where applications begin and how service changes impact the broader system.
vFunction keeps boundaries clear and your distributed architecture cohesive and manageable by providing real-time documentation, monitoring architectural drift, and enforcing architectural rules and patterns.
APM tools offer visibility into service dependencies, enabling teams to monitor performance and identify potential issues. However, basic dependency mapping doesn’t reveal specific flows introducing latency, optimization opportunities, or how services interact with resources within specific flows. vFunction fills this gap with automatically generated sequence diagrams, providing deeper insights into service interactions, resource dependencies, and flow optimization.
When teams work on different services within an application, a developer might call another service through an interface and assume their job is done. However, without knowing the full process, they might unknowingly create a circular dependency, where the services call each other in a loop. This problem arises when a developer’s focus is only on their own code, instead of the overall flow of the system.
Understanding these flows is key for building systems that are fast, resilient, and efficient. For example, circular dependencies and long, complex chains of service calls (known as "spaghetti flows") hurt performance and make systems less reliable.
vFunction helps developers and architects who want to improve system architecture see these issues, so they can enhance performance, scalability, and resilience.
“We analyzed both “monolithic” apps and “distributed” apps with microservices. We identified multi-hop and cyclic calls between services, god classes, dead code, high complexity classes… and much more.
vFunction showed us where complexity and coupling lies and how it impacts the architecture and overall application."
Founder, Architech
See how vFunction can accelerate engineering velocity and increase application resiliency and scalability at your organization.
