The evolution of enterprise software architecture has brought microservices to the forefront of modern development practices. Although a microservices architecture offers agility and scalability, it often introduces new complexity that can become overwhelming if left unchecked.
In speaking with customers about their distributed architectures, I’ve seen complexity emerge in various ways as their distributed systems have evolved over the years. This complexity naturally builds up in homegrown applications – even those with only 20-30 services. Another common challenge I’ve encountered is when organizations acquire systems with microservices-based architectures. Teams often lack clarity on service interactions and dependencies, especially when key employees have departed and technical documentation is missing. This leads to slow deployments and significant troubleshooting difficulties across hundreds of microservices.
The Mounting Challenges of Unmanaged Microservices
Although there’s a clear trend toward microservices adoption, merely implementing microservices doesn’t guarantee speed and agility. Without proper management, microservices can proliferate rapidly, creating numerous challenges for development teams. Individual teams may create unexpected cross-dependencies and redundant services, gradually drifting from the original architectural vision. The rise of AI-powered development tools and the corresponding proliferation of code compounds this challenge.
The Impact of Insufficient Governance
When microservices grow without oversight and proper documentation, often resulting in unneeded dependencies and service duplication, organizations face diminished system performance and reduced development velocity, which can result in increased operational complexity and costs. Teams spend more time debugging complex interactions between services and less time delivering new features. They face challenges such as identifying unnecessary circular dependencies, hard-to-trace multi-hop flows and difficulty visualizing and documenting microservices in real time. For large teams, onboarding new team members becomes increasingly cumbersome as the system’s complexity grows.
The long-term impact of this complexity on not only system health but on engineering velocity and team morale puts organizations at risk of lagging innovation. Without intervention, teams must either increase their time spent on maintenance and fixes or face mounting technical debt.
Creating Effective Guardrails
Well-implemented governance enables organizations to support the architectural lifecycle – a continuous process that ensures a system’s architecture remains aligned with its design and evolving requirements. It allows teams to move quickly while maintaining the overall system’s integrity and resilience. These guardrails should define clear boundaries for service interaction, data access patterns and technological choices while still allowing teams to innovate within their domains. Clear guidance helps teams make more consistent decisions, which leads to better system reliability, easier maintenance and faster development cycles.
By enforcing best practices, organizations can avoid suboptimal design decisions that can impact system efficiency and reliability. Moreover, a well-governed architecture typically requires less manual intervention and troubleshooting, reducing the operational burden on IT teams. Governance also permits systems to more efficiently handle increased loads, allowing businesses to grow without the constant need for modernization.
Best Practices for Implementing Effective Microservices Governance
Successful microservices governance requires a balance between control and flexibility. Organizations should establish clear architectural principles that guide team decisions without overly restricting their ability to solve problems. These principles should include:
- Automated checks for architectural violations.
- Clear guidelines for application boundaries.
- Established patterns for common integration scenarios.
- Defined workflows for cross-team collaboration and service changes.
Fostering a culture of architectural responsibility across teams is also important. Organizations must:
- Establish clear guidelines and standards for architectural decisions.
- Integrate architectural considerations into the development process from the beginning.
- Promote the benefits of continuous architectural improvement.
- Enable teams to automatically visualize architecture in real time as it evolves.
Additionally, adopting smaller, autonomous teams can significantly improve collaboration and accountability in microservices development. Following Amazon’s “two-pizza team” principle, the idea is to keep teams small enough that they can be fed two pizzas. This helps ensure streamlined communication and efficient coordination.
Modern Tools For Architectural Governance
Although enterprise architecture has long been a core practice in most organizations, modern architectural governance relies increasingly on automated tools that can detect and prevent architectural drift before it becomes problematic. When architectural observability—or the ability to analyze software architecture, observe drift and identify issues—is combined with AI and automation capabilities, teams can implement and act on the software architecture life cycle in real time. When complemented with application performance management (APM) tools, architectural observability accelerates incident response and reduces mean time to repair (MTTR) through enhanced system visibility and a contextual view of system flows.
Taming Complexity: Examples From the Field
With the right tools, organizations can work their way back to a stable microservices architecture. For example, a global travel services provider acquired a microservices-based system from a smaller organization. At that point, key employees had left the company and minimal documentation made it difficult to see and understand the interactions across hundreds of microservices in production. In this scenario, architectural mapping and sequence diagrams of production flows would provide the necessary visibility into their architecture to regain clarity and control of the distributed system.
In the same context, ensuring adherence to existing architectural rules of the parent company is important for alignment. By implementing architectural observability and governance, the organization can align its microservices-based system with broader portfolio protocols, improving production efficiency, accelerating deployments and simplifying troubleshooting.
This challenge isn’t unique to a single organization. Even industry leaders face governance obstacles when managing complex microservices architectures at scale. Netflix’s transition from a monolithic architecture to microservices has been widely recognized as a success in enabling scalability and innovation. However, as its system grew, the company faced governance challenges in managing service complexity, ensuring stability and maintaining rapid feature development. A prime example is Netflix’s video processing pipeline, which initially ran on a monolithic system called Reloaded but became difficult to scale and maintain as video formats and streaming demands evolved.
To address these challenges, Netflix rebuilt its video pipeline on a microservices-based platform called Cosmos, introducing clear service boundaries and workflow orchestration. This shift to microservices improved observability, accelerated feature development and increased system flexibility. By implementing structured governance and automation, Netflix transformed its video processing pipeline into a more scalable, efficient and adaptable system, ensuring continued innovation while minimizing operational complexity.
The Path To Sustainable Microservices
Microservices architecture offers benefits in terms of scalability and agility. However, its success is contingent on establishing flexible guardrails through effective governance and documentation. By implementing clear principles, automated checks, proper tooling and accurate documentation, organizations can enable their teams to move quickly while maintaining a cohesive, maintainable system architecture. This balanced approach helps ensure that teams can rapidly develop and deploy applications while maintaining the microservices promise of agility and speed.
