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If you’re an engineer or developer involved in microservices adoption or implementation, you know how they’ve reshaped software development by enhancing scalability, flexibility, and fault isolation. However, microservices come with their own set of complex challenges. In this blog, we will look into microservices anti-patterns, often the root cause of issues. These common mistakes can undermine your architecture and derail your projects, leading to significant frustration for the developers building and scaling the microservices. We’ll explore these anti-patterns, understand their consequences, and look at practical strategies to avoid them. First, let’s take a brief look at exactly what an anti-pattern is in regard to microservices.

What are microservices anti-patterns?

In software development, an anti-pattern refers to a frequently used solution that is ineffective or even detrimental. Anti-patterns in microservices typically arise from poor design choices or implementation flaws within a microservices architecture. These often stem from misunderstandings in microservices principles or hasty adoption without proper planning.

These anti-patterns can significantly impact a microservices application in several ways. Implementations endorsing anti-patterns can affect an application in one or many of these areas, including:

• Scalability: They can hinder your application’s ability to handle increased traffic and data volumes.
• Efficiency: Anti-patterns can lead to resource wastage and performance bottlenecks.
• Maintainability: They can make your codebase complex, difficult to understand, and challenging to modify.
• Performance: Poorly designed microservices can result in slow response times and decreased system reliability and user satisfaction.

The best way to avoid these anti-patterns is to recognize and address them early. Since you can’t prevent what you don’t know, the next logical step in our journey is to examine why teams implement these anti-patterns in the first place.

Why do anti-patterns in microservices occur?

Developers and architects don’t intentionally use anti-patterns. Microservice anti-patterns usually result from factors such as:

• Lack of understanding: Teams may adopt microservices without fully grasping the principles of loose coupling, independent deployments, and single responsibility.
• Lack of architecture governance: As applications evolve over time, gradual deviation of the application’s structure and underlying microservices can lead to unintended complexity, resulting in reduced resilience and higher amounts of technical debt.
• Rushing into implementation: Organizations may hastily migrate to microservices without proper planning and design, leading to poorly defined service boundaries and dependencies.
• Legacy systems: Integrating microservices with existing monolithic systems can create challenges and lead to anti-patterns if not handled carefully.
• Inadequate communication: Poor communication between teams working on different services can result in inconsistent data handling, tight coupling, and integration issues.
• Skill gaps: A lack of experience with distributed systems, asynchronous communication, and data management can contribute to design flaws.
• Ignoring organizational context: Microservices architectures need to align with the organization’s structure and culture. Ignoring this can lead to friction and inefficiencies.

Better education and planning can help organizations avoid anti-patterns. By understanding common microservices mistakes and how to prevent them, organizations can sidestep pitfalls and build cleaner, more scalable architectures. Let’s explore these issues, uncover why they occur, and offer practical prevention strategies.

Common microservices anti-patterns

Peter Drucker’s saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” rings true for identifying and addressing microservice anti-patterns. How can you steer clear of these issues if you’re unaware of what they are or the extent of their impact on your code? To close the knowledge gap, let’s examine some widespread microservices anti-patterns.  Being aware of these is crucial for creating a robust microservices architecture. Here are 10 common ones to keep in mind:

1. Monolith in microservices

This anti-pattern occurs when your microservices are so tightly coupled and interdependent that they behave like a monolithic application. By neglecting service independence, you defeat the core benefit of adopting microservices in the first place.

Causes

• Inadequate service boundaries: Services may have overlapping responsibilities or handle too many functions.
• Excessive synchronous communication: Services rely heavily on synchronous calls, creating strong dependencies.
• Shared database: Multiple services directly access and modify the same database, leading to tight coupling.

Solutions

• Define clear service boundaries: Each service should have a specific, well-defined responsibility.
• Favor asynchronous communication: Utilize message queues or event-driven architectures to reduce dependencies.
• Implement separate data stores: Each service should own its data and expose it through APIs.

2. Chatty microservices

Having chatty services can undermine any distributed application. This type of behavior is even more detrimental when it comes to microservices. The anti-pattern of chatty microservices arises when microservices engage in excessive communication, leading to performance bottlenecks and increased latency. Chatty microservices erode the performance and scalability advantages of a microservices architecture. 

Causes

• Fine-grained services: Decomposing services into excessively small units can increase communication overhead.
• Lack of data locality: Services frequently request data from other services instead of caching or replicating it.
• Synchronous communication overuse: Although needed in some scenarios, relying heavily on synchronous service calls can create chains of dependencies and delays.

Solutions

• Right-size your services: Find the balance between granularity and communication efficiency.
• Promote data locality: Enable services to access the data they need locally whenever possible.
• Embrace asynchronous communication: Use message queues to decouple services and reduce blocking calls.

3. Distributed monolith

Piggy-backing on what we discussed earlier under the “monolith in microservices” section, this anti-pattern emerges when microservices are tightly coupled in their deployment and operation, effectively behaving as a distributed monolith. The beauty of microservices is their independence, which allows for ease of maintenance and scaling up.

Issues that arise

• Loss of independent deployments: Changes to one service require coordinated deployments of multiple services.
• Reduced fault isolation: Failures in one service can cascade and affect the entire system.
• Increased complexity: Managing and troubleshooting the system becomes more challenging.

Solutions

• Independent deployments: Ensure each service can be deployed independently without affecting others.
• Asynchronous communication: Reduce dependencies and enable loose coupling.
• Versioning and backward compatibility: Allow services to evolve independently while maintaining compatibility.

4. Over-microservices

There is no universal method for defining your microservices boundaries, offering substantial flexibility in their design. However, excessively decomposing an application into too many fine-grained microservices is a common misstep. While microservices aim to simplify complexity, over-fragmentation introduces new challenges, such as increased chattiness due to the need for more inter-service communication. This can negate the benefits of a microservices architecture. Proper “right-sizing” microservices boundaries and balancing granularity with usability and maintenance considerations are crucial.

Challenges

• Increased operational overhead: Managing a large number of services can become complex and resource-intensive.
• Higher communication costs: Excessive inter-service communication can lead to performance bottlenecks and increased latency.
• Debugging difficulties: Tracing issues across numerous services can be challenging.

Solutions

• Focus on business capabilities: Design services around core business functions rather than overly granular technical concerns.
• Consider team size and structure: Align service boundaries with team responsibilities to promote ownership and autonomy.
• Start with a coarser-grained approach: Begin with fewer, larger services and decompose them further only when necessary.

5. Violating single responsibility

The foundation of a microservices design heavily revolves around the single responsibility principle. A cornerstone of good design, this principle states that each service should have one specific responsibility. Violating this principle by lumping multiple responsibilities into a single service can lead to tight coupling and reduced maintainability.

Importance of adhering to the single responsibility principle

• Improved maintainability: Changes to one functionality are less likely to affect unrelated parts of the service.
• Increased reusability: Well-defined services with clear responsibilities are easier to reuse in different contexts.
• Enhanced testability: Smaller, focused services are easier to test and validate.

How to adhere to the principle

• Clearly define service boundaries: Identify the core function of each service and ensure it aligns with a single business capability.
• Break down complex services: If a service has multiple responsibilities, consider decomposing it into smaller, more focused services.
• Refactor regularly: Continuously review and refactor your services to maintain their cohesiveness as your application evolves.

6. Spaghetti architecture

By now, you’ve likely realized that many anti-patterns have a relation to one another. This anti-pattern describes a microservices architecture where dependencies between services become tangled and complex, resembling a plate of spaghetti. This makes it difficult to understand the system, trace issues, and make changes. What other anti-pattern can this be related to? Over-microservices, where services are made overly granular, is fertile ground to see this anti-pattern take root, amongst a few others.

What spaghetti architecture looks like

• Circular dependencies: Services depend on each other in a circular manner, creating tight coupling and deployment challenges.
• Excessive dependencies: Services rely on numerous other services, increasing communication overhead and complexity.
• Lack of clear ownership: Unclear responsibilities and overlapping functionalities can lead to convoluted dependencies.

Strategies for clean service design

• Establish clear service boundaries: Define clear responsibilities for each service and minimize overlaps.
• Favor asynchronous communication: Reduce dependencies and enable loose coupling.
• Implement API gateways: Centralize communication and simplify interactions between services.
• Employ dependency mapping tools: Visualize and analyze service dependencies to identify and address potential issues.

7. Distributed data inconsistency

In a microservices architecture, data is often distributed across multiple services, each with its own database. This introduces the challenge of maintaining data consistency across the system.

Data synchronization challenges

• Data duplication: The same data might be stored in different formats or with varying levels of detail across services.
• Concurrent updates: Multiple services might try to update the same data simultaneously, leading to conflicts and inconsistencies.
• Data integrity: Ensuring that data remains accurate and valid across all services can be complex.

How to avoid distributed data inconsistency

• Event-driven architecture: Propagate data changes through events to keep services synchronized.
• Saga pattern: Implement transaction management across multiple services to ensure data consistency in distributed transactions (see example below).
• CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation): This pattern separates read and write operations to improve performance and simplify data management. 
• Data consistency checks: Implement mechanisms to detect and resolve data inconsistencies.

8. Tight coupling

Tight coupling, a main theme throughout many of the other anti-patterns discussed,  occurs when services are highly dependent. This results in difficulty changing individual services (monolith in microservices) or deploying them independently (modular monolith). When used incorrectly or unintentionally, this can decrease the flexibility and scalability we usually experience as core benefits of implementing microservices.

Identifying and mitigating dependencies

• Analyze service interactions: Map out the communication patterns between services to identify potential areas of tight coupling.
• Favor asynchronous communication: Use message queues or event-driven architectures to reduce dependencies.
• API gateways: Introduce an API gateway to abstract internal service interactions and reduce direct dependencies.
• Contract-driven development: Define clear contracts for service interactions to promote loose coupling.

9. Lack of observability

In an ideal world, everything works flawlessly without the need for debugging or performance tracing. However, in reality, software development and architecture often require adjustments and optimizations from the very outset. Observability refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system by examining its external outputs.  Observability is crucial for monitoring, troubleshooting, and understanding complex service interactions In a microservices architecture.

Importance of monitoring

• Early problem detection: Identify and address performance issues, errors, and anomalies before they impact users.
• Performance optimization: Gain insights into service performance and identify bottlenecks.
• Root cause analysis: Trace issues across multiple services to understand their root cause. Beyond standard APM tools, architectural observability uncovers deep-seated issues in the architecture — circular dependencies, duplicate services, overly complex flows, resource exclusivity — that can severely impact speed and performance.  
• Awareness of architectural drift: Understand your application’s current state and how far it is adhering or veering away from its target state. Products like vFunction use architectural observability to identify and manage architectural drift. 

How to implement observability

• Centralized logging: Aggregate logs from all services into a central location for analysis.
• Distributed tracing: Track requests as they flow through the system to identify latency issues and dependencies.
• Metrics and monitoring: Collect key metrics (e.g., response times and error rates) to monitor service health and performance.
• Health checks: Implement health endpoints for each service to monitor their availability and responsiveness.

10. Ignoring human costs

While microservices offer technical advantages, they also introduce organizational and human challenges. Ignoring these human costs can lead to project delays, team conflicts, and decreased morale. To build an effective, full-scale microservices architecture, you need  your team on the same page with collaborative planning and implementation of the microservices architecture. Without this, projects can quickly go off the rails.

Addressing team dynamics and project management

• Cross-functional teams: Organize teams around business capabilities, ensuring they have the necessary skills to develop and operate their services independently.
• Clear communication channels: Establish effective communication channels to facilitate collaboration between teams.
• Up-to-date microservices documentation. A real-time, accurate view of your architecture, service dependencies, and interactions ensures all team members are working with the most current information, reducing confusion, minimizing errors, and enhancing collaboration.
• Shared ownership: Encourage shared ownership and responsibility for the overall system.
• Continuous learning: Invest in training and development to equip teams with the skills to succeed in a microservices environment.

Strategies to avoid microservices anti-patterns

Avoiding microservices anti-patterns can be relatively easy when equipped with the right mindset and skills. Here are a few design and implementation pointers to keep you on the right track as you go ahead with planning and implementation:

Aligning services with domain-driven design

Domain-driven design (DDD) emphasizes understanding the business domain and modeling services around its core concepts. The result is cohesive services that are loosely coupled and aligned with the needs of the business. In practice, domain-driven design principles follow the path below:

• Identify bounded contexts: Decompose the domain into distinct bounded contexts, each representing a specific area of responsibility.
• Define aggregates: Group related entities into aggregates to ensure data consistency and simplify data management.
• Use ubiquitous language: Establish a shared vocabulary between developers and domain experts to ensure clear communication and understanding.

Enabling architecture governance

Architecture governance helps prevent microservices anti-patterns by providing clear guidelines and enforceable rules for design and implementation. It ensures that teams develop within established standards, promoting consistency across services and reducing the risk of unnecessary complexity. vFunction incorporates architecture governance into its platform, allowing teams to:

• Monitor and receive alerts about their distributed architecture to ensure all services are calling authorized servers,
• Enforce boundaries between particular services
• Maintain correct database-to-microservice relationships. 

Implementing API gateways

API gateways are a must-have for an organization implementing microservices. API gateways are a single entry point for clients to access your microservices. They can help in many areas, including enhancing security and reducing the complexity of client-service interactions. Here are some key benefits:

• Centralized access: All client traffic is proxied through the gateway versus having clients interact directly with each service.
• Routing and load balancing: The gateway routes requests to the appropriate services and can distribute traffic to keep services running optimally.
• Security and authentication: Implement security policies and authentication at the gateway level, abstracting this from the services themselves.

Enabling asynchronous communication

Asynchronous communication is vital for decoupling microservices and preventing tight coupling. Although there are quite a few ways to accomplish this, there are two main ways to go about this when it comes to microservices that improve scalability and fault tolerance as well as loose coupling:

• Message queues: Services publish messages to queues, and other services consume them asynchronously.
• Event-driven architecture: Services publish events when their state changes; other services can subscribe to these events and react accordingly.

Encouraging regular refactoring and reviews

Microservices often change quickly, especially at first. To keep the code clean and ensure the services work well together, it’s important to regularly refactor and review the code. This approach helps teams maintain quality, manage technical debt, and avoid bad practices by focusing on two key practices. 

• Refactoring: Restructure code to improve its design, readability, and maintainability without changing external behavior.
• Code reviews: Conduct peer reviews to identify potential issues, ensure code consistency, and share knowledge among team members.

Tools and frameworks to support microservices best practices

A wide range of tools and frameworks can be leveraged to build and manage microservices. Sometimes, the sheer amount of tools and frameworks available is overwhelming. The best of the bunch generally promote best practices and help avoid or fix common anti-patterns. Here are some key categories and popular examples of tools within each category:

Containerization and orchestration

• Docker: A platform for packaging, distributing, and running applications in containers, providing isolation and portability.
• Kubernetes: A powerful container orchestration system often coupled with Docker that automates containerized application deployment, scaling, and management.

API gateways and service mesh

• Kong: An open-source API gateway (also with an enterprise and hybrid cloud flavor as well) that provides routing, authentication, and rate limiting for microservices.
• Tyk: Another popular open-source API gateway (also with a cloud and enterprise variant) with features like request transformation and built-in analytics.
• Istio: One of the most popular service mesh platforms that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices.

Messaging and event streaming

• Kafka: An open-source distributed streaming platform for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. You can run the open-source variant on your infrastructure or choose from a variety of Kafka-based cloud services, such as Confluent Cloud.
• RabbitMQ: Another popular open-source message broker that supports various messaging protocols and patterns.

Monitoring and observability

• Prometheus: An open-source monitoring system that collects metrics from your services and provides alerting capabilities.
• Grafana: A visualization tool that allows you to create dashboards and visualize metrics from various sources, including Prometheus.
• vFunction: An architectural observability platform that can help visualize and manage microservices architecture and governance.

Microservices Frameworks and libraries

• Spring Boot: A popular Java framework for building microservices with features like auto-configuration and embedded servers.
• Node.js with Express: A lightweight and efficient framework for building microservices in JavaScript.
• Python with Flask or Django: Popular frameworks for developing microservices in Python.

Architecture governance

Architecture governance is key in enforcing microservices best practices by setting clear standards for design, development, and deployment. It ensures services are autonomously developed yet remain coherent within the system, adhering to security, data management, and communication protocols. 

• Kubernetes: Although primarily a container orchestration tool, Kubernetes manages service discovery, scaling, load balancing, and self-healing, ensuring that microservices’ deployment and runtime behaviors align with architectural standards.
• vFunction: vFunction enables teams to set and enforce architecture rules, including service and resource dependencies, patterns, and standards. With real-time alerts for rule violations, it helps keep services and development with architectural best practices.

Although not an exhaustive list, these technologies form the core of many microservices implementations. By adding these tried and tested frameworks and tools to your stack, you can be confident in building a sturdy foundation for your microservices and avoiding common anti-patterns.

Real-life examples of avoiding microservices anti-patterns

Understanding microservices anti-patterns is crucial, but learning from real-world cases provides actionable insights for implementing them in your organization without falling into common pitfalls. Here are a few examples:

Capital One

Capital One, a leading financial corporation, has been at the forefront of adopting microservices to transform its IT infrastructure. This shift has enabled faster application development, improved scalability, and enhanced customer experience across its digital banking services. Their implementation focuses on building resilient systems that avoid anti-patterns in their design systems to absorb fluctuations in demand and simplify the management of their extensive financial offerings.

Metlife

MetLife is elevating its IT infrastructure by prioritizing the recruitment of experts in microservices architecture, specifically those passionate about steering clear of common anti-patterns. This strategy ensures their transition to a more flexible and scalable IT environment benefits from seasoned professionals keen on maintaining system integrity and optimizing performance. By focusing on hiring individuals committed to best practices in microservices, MetLife aims to enhance service efficiency and personalize customer experiences in the competitive insurance sector.

Etsy

Etsy, another of the most popular platforms on the internet,  needed to migrate from its original monolithic architecture to microservices while maintaining high performance and reliability for its e-commerce platform. To this end, Etsy adopted a gradual migration strategy, starting with smaller, less critical services and gradually decomposing its monolith. It also focused on automation and continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) to ensure smooth deployment and keep microservice coupling to a minimum.

Turo

Turo, the world’s largest car-sharing marketplace, embarked on a journey to scale their operations by shifting from a monolithic architecture to microservices, responding to the challenges posed by their rapid growth and the limitations of their existing application. By leveraging vFunction’s architectural observability platform, they were able to visualize and analyze their software architecture, enabling a strategic extraction of microservices that addressed latency issues and improved engineering velocity. This transition resulted in significant performance enhancements, including faster response times and more efficient code deployment, effectively avoiding common microservices anti-patterns and ensuring scalability and resilience.

Final thoughts: Building microservices and how vFunction can help

Though many tools and techniques can help address common microservices anti-patterns, establishing a strong foundation of architecture governance from the outset is one of the most effective ways to prevent them.” vFunction’s architectural observability platform provides deep visibility across customers’ microservices, helping to identify architectural drift and emerging issues. It also enables architecture governance, ensuring development stays aligned with established standards and guidelines—preventing disruptive anti-patterns before they take hold. Actively promoting best practices enhances application health, boosts developer productivity, and ensures faster, more dependable releases.

Microservices present a compelling option for application architecture, yet they are not without complexities. By comprehensively grasping and sidestepping the anti-patterns highlighted in this blog post, you can lay the groundwork for a scalable and maintainable microservices infrastructure.  Remember these essentials:

• Plan carefully: Don’t rush into microservices without understanding your needs and a well-defined strategy.
• Define clear service boundaries: Align services with business capabilities and ensure they have a single responsibility.
• Embrace loose coupling: Favor asynchronous communication and avoid tight dependencies between services.
• Prioritize observability: Implement different types of observability, including architectural observability, to gain insights into your system’s health, performance, and architecture.
• Invest in the right tools and technologies: Leverage tools and frameworks that support microservices best practices and automation.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement: Encourage regular refactoring, code reviews, and knowledge sharing to maintain code quality and prevent anti-patterns.

Successfully building microservices requires combining technical expertise and organizational alignment, as well as a significant mindset shift for those moving from monoliths.  Adhere to these core principles and establish robust architecture governance as you progress.

Ready to keep your microservices architecture on track? Contact us to learn more about how vFunction’s architectural observability platform helps avoid anti-patterns by supporting governance, identifying drift and dependencies, and providing real-time documentation to help teams stay aligned with the current state of their architecture.

A few years ago, I discussed a new opportunity with a friend who had recently taken a full-stack role at a prominent finance startup. He took the role mainly because they touted how awesome it was to work with their microservices architecture. “Hundreds of microservices, Matt… it’s going to be awesome to see how to build something this big with microservices under the hood!” I looked forward to connecting with him again once he had settled in and learned the ways of the masters.

However, my friend’s enthusiasm had waned just a few days after starting. Although the microservices architecture functioned exceptionally, he found the documentation on how the microservices integrated and operated together lacking. While I can’t share the exact image, I will illustrate below the kind of documentation he received during his onboarding.

Comprehensive? Not quite.

Of course, as developers, we often struggle with documentation, a problem magnified when dealing with hundreds of microservices. The takeaway is clear: effective microservices require complete and easy-to-understand documentation. This blog will explore best practices and tools to ensure your microservices are well-documented and ready for scale. Let’s get started by looking deeper at why microservice documentation matters.

Why microservices documentation matters

Microservices architecture has revolutionized how we develop software, breaking up traditional monolithic codebases and architectures into smaller, independent services. While this has allowed for more flexible, extensible, and scalable services, it has also introduced complexity, posing challenges for users and developers not fully understanding the systems built upon them. Thus, adequate documentation is crucial as it helps developers manage and utilize the increasingly complex networks of microservices, which can involve hundreds or even thousands of endpoints.

Enabling collaboration across distributed teams

In a microservices architecture, enabling collaboration across distributed teams is crucial for success. Microservices allow different teams to work on smaller services independently, fostering a culture of innovation and agility. However, these loosely coupled services can become challenging to manage without proper documentation. Comprehensive microservices documentation acts as a central resource, ensuring that all teams can access the information they need to understand and communicate effectively with other services. This shared knowledge base is critical for collaboration, allowing teams to align on the service’s desired functionality, capabilities, and, most importantly, how teams can use and consume the service.

Simplifying onboarding and knowledge sharing

Microservices documentation is essential for streamlining onboarding and facilitating knowledge sharing within organizations. It offers new developers a clear starting point by outlining the system’s domain model, architectural patterns, and communication mechanisms. By providing detailed insights into each microservice, including its dependencies and APIs, good documentation can significantly reduce the learning curve, allowing new team members to quickly contribute to the project.

So why, then, do developers often skip creating documentation, even though it’s vital for effectively using and maintaining microservices? Often, they hit common stumbling blocks, leading to poor quality documentation or none at all. Let’s examine some of these challenges more closely.

Common challenges in documenting microservices

Writing documentation for microservices and code, in general, is often not a developer’s favorite task. “I write code that documents itself” is a favorite line for many, but microservices documentation is more than just code comments. Let’s look at some common challenges developers face when writing microservices documentation.

Managing documentation for rapidly changing code

In the early stages of a project, code often changes quickly, making it hard for documentation to keep up. As a result, documentation may be skipped or minimized with the common excuse of “I’ll do it later.” However, as a former colleague once said, “For developers, ‘later’ usually means ‘never.'”

Handling fragmented and inconsistent documentation

When documentation is kept to a minimum or written without standards, it tends to become fragmented and inconsistent. We will touch on this later under the best practices section as we discuss ways to overcome such challenges.

Maintaining accuracy and relevance in documentation over time

For microservices documentation to be useful, it must be accurate and up-to-date, much like code comments. However, without proper maintenance standards, even existing documentation can fall behind, leading to confusion. Outdated or incorrect documentation can be more harmful than having none. 

Despite these challenges, there’s good news: innovative tools have emerged to streamline the creation and maintenance of documentation. Let’s explore some essential tools that can help you master microservices documentation.

Architecture diagrams vs. documentation for microservices

But, before tools, a quick word on diagrams. Architecture diagrams and documentation serve distinct yet complementary roles in managing microservices. Architecture diagrams provide a high-level, visual overview of the system, illustrating the relationships between services, dependencies, and workflows. They are ideal for understanding the “big picture,” onboarding new developers, or planning system changes. In contrast, documentation offers detailed, written insights into individual microservices, including their functionality, API endpoints, communication protocols, and implementation details. While diagrams summarize system structure, documentation details the specifics needed for day-to-day operations and troubleshooting. Together, they provide a complete picture that balances strategic oversight with technical detail.

Essential tools for microservices documentation

API documentation tools

Postman

Developers recognize Postman for building and testing APIs, but its capabilities extend to offering excellent tools for creating and hosting API documentation.  

Tool highlights

• Generates interactive API documentation directly from API specifications.
• Supports collaboration with team workspaces and version control.
• Offers built-in API testing and monitoring capabilities.

SwaggerHub

OpenAPI specifications were previously known as Swagger specifications. So, it’s no surprise that Swagger, the team behind OpenAPI, has a top-class API design and documentation tool: SwaggerHub. Like Postman, it enables users to create and host top-notch API documentation.

Tool highlights

• Allows easy creation and sharing of OpenAPI specifications.
• Integrated API lifecycle management.
• Supports seamless collaboration across teams.

Diagramming and visualization tools

For internal architecture documentation, essential tools include diagramming and visualization software. While numerous options exist for crafting flow diagrams, wireframes, and architecture documentation, certain tools stand out for their superior features. Here, we highlight a few highly recommended choices.

Lucidchart

Extending to many different types of diagrams and charts, LucidChart is a great tool for creating flowcharts, diagrams, and system architectures. It simplifies the creation of flowcharts, making the interaction between microservices understandable even to non-technical users.

Tool highlights

• Offers customizable templates for microservices architecture.
• Real-time collaboration for distributed teams.
• Integrates with popular tools like Confluence and Jira.

vFunction

Ever wish you could just plug something into your code and automatically visualize the architecture? With vFunction, you can do exactly that. The vFunction architectural observability platform allows teams to import and export ‘architecture as code,’ aligning live application architecture with diagrams in real time to maintain consistency as systems evolve. It matches real-time flows with C4 reference diagrams, detects architectural drift, and provides the context needed to identify, prioritize, and address issues with a clear understanding of their impact.

Tool highlights:

• Automatically visualizes system architecture and dependencies.
• Keeps documentation updated with real-time system changes.
• Reduces the manual effort of creating and maintaining diagrams.
• Automatically integrates architecture tasks (TODOs) with Jira

Centralized documentation repositories

While we’ve discussed hosting API documentation, teams seeking to create centralized documentation repositories have many choices, from free and open-source options such as Hugo to managed solutions like those listed below.

Confluence

If you’re not already using it, you’ve likely heard it in conversation. A widely used collaboration and documentation platform by Atlassian, Confluence is a go-to for many enterprises looking to host their documentation internally and externally.

Tool highlights:

• Centralized space for teams to store and manage microservices documentation.
• Version control and change tracking for documentation updates.
• Integrates seamlessly with other development tools like Jira.

GitBook

Internal or external product and API docs are easy to create on this platform that is optimized for development teams. With a visual editor and the ability to manage docs in markdown, this solution is extremely popular with developers who are creating documentation.

Tool highlights:

• Markdown-based editing for quick and easy documentation updates.
• Supports public and private documentation repositories.
• Provides search functionality to make navigating documentation easier.

Best practices for effective microservices documentation

To get the most out of your microservice documentation, there are a few helpful tips and tricks – many of which align with general best practices for good documentation. Here are my top three recommendations for documenting microservices.

Standardizing documentation across teams

First, you need to establish standard documentation practices. For example, if you were documenting a microservice that is exposed via API for internal use, you might see:

• The microservice name and a brief description
• An architecture diagram of your microservices applications
• Potentially, a diagram of where the microservice sits in the overall system architecture
• The repository, such as a GitHub link, where the code for the microservice lives
• The API spec, usually written/generated as an OpenAPI spec, is rendered in the docs for developers to easily consume the API exposed through the microservice.
• Any other applicable information, including the team responsible for the microservices maintenance and support

Once you set a documentation standard, create a template for all teams to use. Since microservices evolve, documentation must be updated accordingly, which we address in the next point.

Creating living documentation

To keep up with the evolution of microservices, it’s essential to regularly update your documentation to reflect the latest capabilities. Ideally, your hosting platform should display a “last updated” timestamp and maintain a changelog. Remember, documentation is dynamic; it should grow with your systems, and improved documentation practices should be incorporated as they emerge.

My recommendation, especially for teams operating within the Agile framework, is to make documentation creation and updates a mandatory requirement. The easiest way to do this is to make it a critical piece in your “definition of done” when it comes to stories.

This means that in order for a story to be completed, documentation also needs to be created and revisited. For those working outside of Agile methodologies, the same can be done, ensuring that any tasks marked as 100% complete involve the applicable documentation creation or updates.

Automating documentation updates

Automating documentation, when possible, can help ensure it remains accurate and relevant. A good example of this might be leveraging an API gateway that exposes an OpenAPI spec for your microservices; some even have internal developer portals that can automatically create documentation based on an OpenAPI spec (which may also be generated automatically).

Architectural observability tools can play a role in automating documentation. For instance, vFunction can create architecture diagrams based on your latest system design, making aspects of “living documentation” more manageable through automation.

By implementing these best practices, you can significantly improve the quality and scalability of your microservices documentation. As your microservices evolve, these strategies will ensure your documentation keeps pace, making it a valuable resource for developers.

Conclusion: Building a culture of continuous documentation

Documenting microservices effectively is not just about creating files and diagrams but fostering a culture of continuous and holistic documentation within your organization. By implementing standardized documentation practices, creating living documents, and leveraging automation where possible, you ensure your microservices documentation is helpful, scalable, and easy to manage.

As the microservices landscape evolves, documentation should also keep pace with new features and changes in the system. This approach not only aids in onboarding and collaboration but also empowers developers to innovate more rapidly. It allows external developers to easily integrate with your microservice and helps internal teams understand its current state, making it easier to enhance functionality or resolve issues. Ultimately, good documentation should be a cornerstone of your microservices development strategy.

How vFunction helps

vFunction transforms microservices documentation by automating diagram creation and aligning live application architecture with its documentation using the ‘architecture as code’ principle. This real-time alignment ensures consistency, detects architectural drift, and harmonizes workflows as systems evolve.

With automated updates and real-time visualization of system architecture and dependencies, documentation remains accurate and instantly reflects changes. This automation significantly cuts down on manual effort, allowing developers to focus on enhancing and scaling microservices without the burden of manual updates.

Like some software development conspiracy, there are literally “microservices everywhere.” If you contrast microservices with the more legacy monolithic approach, it’s likely no surprise why they have become so popular. Microservice adoption has revolutionized software application design, development, and deployment. Organizations seeking agility, scalability, and resilience can get this by building new applications as microservices or breaking down monolithic applications into smaller, independent services leveraging a microservices architecture. However, building microservices can be complex, so picking the right framework from the many available options is essential.

This blog post explores the facets of microservices frameworks, diving into popular options for Python and Go and other top contenders in different languages. We’ll examine the benefits and challenges and discuss how to evaluate the right framework for your current needs and future trends. Let’s start by looking at why choosing the right framework is so critical.

Choosing the right microservices framework

Building microservices-based applications is akin to assembling a complex machine. Each service has its place in the overall system and the framework can either help or hinder your ability to seamlessly combine services into a cohesive whole. Choosing the proper framework can make or break your project, impacting everything from development speed to application performance and long-term maintainability.

Key benefits of microservices frameworks

A framework generally contains the essential tools and blueprints to simplify microservices development. Frameworks provide ready-made components and libraries that eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel, enforcing standardized design patterns and best practices. Access to tools, in particular, is a significant benefit of a framework because they can simplify service discovery, community support, and data serialization, which makes it easier to develop your service and ultimately connect and manage your microservices. Depending on the framework chosen, some frameworks have built-in support for features like load balancing, fault tolerance, and distributed tracing, all capabilities of a well-thought-out microservices implementation and deployment. If not included in the particular framework you chose out of the box, many have middleware and plugins available that can support these features.

Challenges addressed by modern frameworks

Microservices come with unique challenges, and many of them are well-understood by the wider development community. But, imagine you’ve never built a microservice before or are trying to figure out how to take your monolith and break it down into microservices. Frameworks can help manage both of these scenarios by taking best practices and baking them directly into their design. This makes your development path forward much clearer, and because it’s directly spelled out in the framework documentation, it removes any guesswork or uncertainty you may have about this process for your services if you are inexperienced with developing microservices. 

For example, a framework can be very helpful with regards to data consistency, which is often tricky to manage. However, your chosen framework may automatically integrate with distributed transaction management tools to help maintain data consistency across independent services or service instances.

Another significant challenge presented by the distributed nature of a microservices architecture is monitoring and debugging. Most frameworks incorporate logging, tracing, and metrics tools to improve observability and debugging out-of-the-box, while potentially giving you options such as leveraging OpenTelemetry with a few minor changes. 

Frameworks minimize microservices challenges, which is why choosing one with a solid team and community behind it is important. A framework helps to guide teams toward building more resilient, maintainable, and scalable systems.

Best microservices frameworks

Now that we understand why choosing the right framework is important, let’s look at top choices across popular languages. First, we’ll start with popular options for Python and Go, followed by some other leading frameworks worth considering if you’re working in different languages.

Python microservices frameworks

The popularity of Python means that there are quite a few solid options for microservice frameworks. If you’re working in Python, you may already be using some of these frameworks in your current stack. This means that repurposing them for microservice development might be super simple to get started. Let’s take a look at two of the more popular options.

Django + Django REST framework

Django is a high-level Python web application framework initially released in 2005. Django has built-in features like object-relational mapping (ORM), a templating engine, and an admin panel. When paired with the Django REST Framework (DRF), it becomes a great solution for rapidly building RESTful APIs.

The highlights of this framework include:

• Comprehensive toolset: Offers a wide array of built-in components (ORM, templating, admin) that can accelerate building your services.
• Robust security: Features built-in protections against XSS, CSRF, and SQL injection.
• Strong community: Large and active user base, extensive documentation, and numerous third-party packages.
• Rapid development: DRF makes creating and managing APIs straightforward, letting you focus on business logic instead of reinventing the wheel to get endpoints up and running.

Of course, with the good also comes some challenges and drawbacks. For Django, these include:

• Feature-heavy for lightweight services: Out-of-the-box, Django can feel heavy for smaller or more lightweight microservices if you don’t need many or most of the included features. 
• Steeper learning curve: The breadth of built-in features can be overwhelming for beginners vs a smaller framework that’s more focused on simple, light-weight services.
• Performance: While suitable for many applications, Django might not match the raw speed of more performance-focused frameworks.

FastAPI

FastAPI is a high-performance web framework for Python, introduced in 2018. It was built on Starlette (for async server components) and Pydantic (for data validation), making it well-suited for creating fast and efficient APIs in Python 3.6+. Its emphasis on service performance and developer experience has allowed it to quickly gain popularity in the microservices world.

Highlights of FastAPI include:

• High performance: Designed to handle a large volume of requests with minimal latency.
• Automatic documentation: Generates interactive API docs with OpenAPI/Swagger by default.
• Developer-friendly: Clean and intuitive syntax, easy to learn for newcomers to Python or microservices.
• Asynchronous support: Natively supports async/await, which simplifies building highly concurrent applications.

Along with some downsides, which include:

• Growing ecosystem: While it’s rapidly expanding, FastAPI’s ecosystem and community are still maturing compared to more established frameworks like Django.
• Less feature-rich: You may need to integrate additional packages or write more boilerplate for complex use cases.

Go microservices frameworks

If you’re looking for performance, many developers head towards Golang-based frameworks. Known for its speed and lightweight nature, the Go programming language offers several strong frameworks with which to build microservices. Let’s look at two that are amongst the most popular.

Go Micro

Go Micro is a pluggable Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework explicitly designed for building distributed services in Go (Golang). It provides foundational building blocks for service discovery, load balancing, and other distributed system essentials. Its design aims to simplify creating, connecting, and managing microservices for developers working in Go.

Some  key highlights of Go Micro include:

• Service discovery: Offers built-in mechanisms for microservices to register and discover each other.
• Load balancing: Includes out-of-the-box load-balancing capabilities for better scalability and reliability.
• Message encoding flexibility: Supports multiple encodings (Protobuf, JSON), allowing easy service interoperability.
• Pluggable architecture: Enables swapping out components (e.g., transports, brokers) to fit specific infrastructure needs.

Alongside the highlights, there are a few challenges that developers should be aware of as well:

• Less prescriptive: Go Micro’s pluggable approach leaves some architecture decisions up to the developer, which can overwhelm newcomers.
• Community size: While Go has a strong community, the Go Micro community is smaller than established frameworks in other languages.

Go Kit

Go Kit is a toolkit rather than a full-fledged framework, emphasizing best practices and core software engineering principles for microservices. It originated from the need to build microservices that focus on maintainability, reliability, and scalable design in Go without relying on a larger, more complex framework.

Highlights of this framework include:

• Layered architecture: Encourages separation of core business logic, transport code, and infrastructure, promoting clean design.
• Modularity and composability: Builds services with small, reusable components that are easy to test and maintain.
• Observability: Provides built-in support and patterns for logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.
• Best-practice guidance: Steers developers toward clear service boundaries, proper error handling, and interface-driven design.

Similar to the other libraries we discussed, the challenges for Go Kit include:

• Steep learning curve: The emphasis on best practices and patterns can be daunting for less experienced Go developers.
• Not a one-stop solution: Since it’s a toolkit, you might need additional libraries or deeper configuration to get all desired features.

Other top frameworks for microservices

Besides Python and Go, almost every other language has frameworks that can aid with microservice development. Although we can’t cover all of them within this blog, let’s look at a few other popular alternatives for languages such as Java and C# (.NET).

Spring Boot (Java)

If you work in enterprise Java, you’ve likely used or encountered Spring, one of the most popular Java libraries. Spring Boot is a widely adopted framework for building Java-based applications derived from the larger Spring ecosystem. Released in 2014, it simplifies Spring application development by reducing configuration overhead and providing production-ready features out of the box. 

For developers using Spring Boot as a Java microservices framework, highlights include:

• Convention over configuration: Automatically configures much of the application based on added dependencies.
• Embedded servers: Includes Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow, eliminating the need for separate server deployment.
• Production-ready features: Offers health checks, metrics, and built-in externalized configuration.
• Extensive ecosystem: Leverages the vast Spring community and its robust set of libraries, including technologies like Spring Cloud.

With the upside also comes a few downsides and challenges that the framework poses for developers as well:

• Resource intensive: Spring Boot applications often consume more memory and resources than lighter frameworks.
• Complexity: While “auto-configuration” helps, the Spring ecosystem is large and can become complex for smaller-scale microservices.

Micronaut (Java, Groovy, Kotlin)

Micronaut is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) framework introduced to address the performance drawbacks of traditional frameworks like Spring. It supports the Java, Kotlin and Groovy programming languages and uses ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to reduce startup time and memory usage, making it particularly appealing for microservices and serverless applications.

Framework highlights include:

• Fast startup: AOT compilation pre-computes many framework related tasks, reducing startup times.
• Cloud-native: Provides integrations for various cloud services, facilitating development in containerized and serverless environments.
• Reactive support: Allows building responsive and resilient microservices through reactive programming models.

Downsides of Micronaut include:

• Smaller community: Micronaut is newer than Spring, so the user community and available resources, while growing, may be more limited.
• Learning curve: Switching from a more traditional Java framework to reactive programming may require new ways of thinking about software development.

Quarkus (Java)

Quarkus is newer but quickly gaining steam within the Java microservices space. Its growing popularity is due to its capacity for fast startup times and reduced resource consumption. It’s optimized for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot. It focuses on containerized deployments and serverless functions, making it a popular choice for the Kubernetes-based infrastructures that are quite common within microservices deployments.

Working with Quarkus as their framework of choice, developers can expect to gain the following advantages:

• Container-first approach: Optimized for running in containers with minimal resource overhead.
• Kubernetes integration: Seamlessly supports service discovery, configuration, and health checks in Kubernetes environments.
• Reactive programming: Integrates with libraries like Vert.x for building reactive microservices and supports a functional programming style for those who want it.

They can also expect to come across these challenges as well:

• Younger ecosystem: While adoption is growing rapidly, Quarkus still trails more established frameworks in community size and third-party integrations.
• Less familiar: Developers deeply rooted in traditional Java EE or Spring might need a learning period to adapt to Quarkus’s approach.
• Learning curve: Reactive programming may be a large hurdle for teams not experienced with this way of developing microservices.

ASP.NET Core

If you’re working in C# or VB, you’ve likely come across Microsoft’s .NET framework. ASP.NET Core is Microsoft’s cross-platform, open-source framework for building modern web and cloud-based applications. First released in 2016 as a reimagining of the .NET ecosystem, it has evolved quickly to become a popular choice for high-performance microservices on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This popularity comes from the inclusion of many of these highlights:

• High performance: Known for handling large traffic loads with minimal resource consumption.
• Modular design: This lets you include only the necessary components, keeping microservices lightweight.
• Rich ecosystem: Benefits from Microsoft’s extensive tooling, libraries, and a large community.

Even though the ecosystem is mature, there still are some downsides to using .NET Core, including:

• Evolving platform: Although mature, ASP.NET Core continues to advance rapidly; keeping up with changes and various releases can require ongoing effort.
• Windows-centric heritage: While cross-platform now, some developers may still encounter friction or have limited existing .NET exposure on non-Windows systems.

As with most technical decisions, each framework offers unique strengths. So, with so many choices, how should you evaluate the possible solutions to best suit your use case? Let’s look at how to break this down in the next section.

How to evaluate a microservices framework

With so many frameworks vying for your attention, how do you choose the right one for your project? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer; the best choice depends on your needs and priorities and other factors, such as the language you want to build with and the business capabilities needed. It’s also important to consider your team’s experience with the languages or frameworks you’re evaluating. However, here are some crucial factors to consider when evaluating a microservices framework.

Performance and scalability

Performance is at the core of microservices architecture. To accurately gauge how a framework will perform, you should consider a few key questions and match them to the capabilities of the framework. These questions include:

• How many requests per second does your application need to handle?
• How quickly/what latency is acceptable for a response?
• How well does the framework scale horizontally to handle increased traffic?

Overall resource consumption is another metric to consider when choosing the best framework for your needs, depending on the use case. Examining benchmarks and performance tests to fully understand the framework’s capabilities can help answer these questions.

Ease of integration with other tools

Microservices rely on various tools and technologies, such as databases, message queues, and monitoring systems. To ensure the framework will play nicely with the ecosystem you already have in place, you’ll need to ask questions such as:

• Does the framework support your cloud provider’s services and APIs?
• How easily does it integrate with other tools, such as those that provide logging and monitoring? Are these capabilities built in?

The ease of integration with the tools you are already using is a key factor in the speed and ease with which you can build microservices.

Learning curve and community support

It’s essential to consider both how easy it will be for you and your team to learn the framework and how easy it will be to work with it. A big part of this comes down to the documentation. Is it regularly updated, and does it cover all the bases? Alongside quality documentation, an active community, especially with an active forum or StackOverflow presence, is also an excellent resource for getting the most out of your chosen framework when you have questions. A framework with a gentle learning curve, excellent documentation, and a vibrant community can save you time and effort in the long run.

Comparison of Python vs. Go for microservices

Python and Go are popular choices for building microservices, but they have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Let’s compare these two languages to help you decide which fits your project better.

Which should you choose?

Ultimately, the choice between Python and Go depends on your context. Before making a decision, carefully consider your project’s requirements, the team’s expertise, and the strengths of each language. If a rich ecosystem of libraries for diverse tasks and improved developer productivity is important, and your team is already familiar with Python, that’s likely the way to go. On the other hand, Go is an excellent choice if performance and scalability are critical requirements and you need to build highly concurrent microservices. Of course, this only works if your team is already familiar with or willing to learn Go. Overall, most developers will first choose the language they are already using (or most familiar with) and then move to the tougher decision of the precise framework they want to use within the bounds of that language.

Future trends in microservices frameworks

New trends and technologies in microservices are constantly emerging to address the challenges and opportunities of building modern distributed systems. Here are some key trends shaping the future of microservices frameworks.

Enhanced observability

Frameworks increasingly integrate tools like OpenTelemetry to provide built-in support for monitoring, logging, and tracing, simplifying troubleshooting in distributed systems. As we move into the future, we expect many frameworks to either have observability built directly into them or easily integrate with existing observability technologies.

Stronger security

Zero-trust models and features like mutual transport layer security (mTLS) are becoming standard to secure service communication. Frameworks are also adding compliance-focused tools to address regulations like GDPR and CCPA. In the future, expect to see frameworks with best practices for these technologies and standards baked right in, making security a core piece of the framework without developers having to do much to enable it.

Cloud-native integration

Frameworks are evolving to work seamlessly with Kubernetes, serverless platforms, and service meshes like Istio, improving scalability, security, and traffic management. As containers and orchestration platforms become more popular, expect to see more specialized frameworks emerge that natively play within this domain.

Within microservice frameworks, these trends will continue to evolve and grow. Many of the future trends above are already well underway. The ecosystem, compared to just a few years back, has made immense strides in solving many of the issues discussed above. 

How vFunction can help

Whether you’re building a new application or modernizing an existing one, transitioning to microservices can be a complex undertaking.

vFunction simplifies the transition to microservices by automating architecture analysis,  identifying architectural issues, and enabling teams to build scalable, resilient applications. For those tackling aging frameworks, vFunction streamlines upgrades from legacy Java EE application servers and transitions older Spring versions to Spring Boot. After transforming your applications to microservices, vFunction continues to monitor architectural drift, enforce design patterns, and prevent sprawl, ensuring your microservices architecture remains efficient, scalable, and manageable over time.

Leveraging OpenRewrite, vFunction accelerates domain-specific framework upgrades, making monolith refactoring faster and more efficient for modern cloud-native environments.

Microservices architecture and governance

In addition to development work and the challenges of selecting a proper microservices framework, building new microservices presents significant architectural and deployment challenges. This can lead to unintended consequences like microservices sprawl or even a distributed monolith. While microservices are designed to promote modularity, poor architectural planning can result in tightly coupled services that share databases, create complex interdependencies, and violate the principles of loose coupling. This can make deployments increasingly difficult, as changes to one service may require synchronized updates across multiple others, negating the benefits of independent deployability.

Increasing number of services can overwhelm deployment pipelines, monitoring tools, and observability systems, making debugging and troubleshooting extremely difficult. Without clear boundaries and proper governance, teams risk building too many microservices and potentially creating a distributed monolith—an architecture where microservices are nominally independent but are so entangled that they behave like a single monolithic application, complete with all the scaling and reliability pitfalls of traditional monoliths. 

vFunction can help teams navigate the challenges of building or maintaining microservices architectures. Whether you’re designing new services or analyzing your existing microservices application, vFunction provides deep visibility into your architecture and ongoing governance to manage them.

Conclusion: building modern applications with the right framework

Microservices offer immense potential for building agile, scalable, and resilient applications. However, navigating the landscape of frameworks can be challenging. When it comes to choosing the right framework to develop microservices, the best choice is the one that matches your project’s needs (performance, scalability, etc.) and aligns with your team’s knowledge.

Learn how vFunction simplifies and accelerates the transition to microservices for existing applications while providing ongoing architecture governance to preserve their scalability and resilience.