From the world of baseball comes the phrase “You win some, you lose some”, specifically from the shady corner of sports betting of the 1920s. Applied to the ever-changing landscape of technologies, programmers are all too familiar with this feeling when some new paradigm shift comes along, it can also come with all new issues. One such paradigm shift is the adoption of microservices based architecture. Microservices are highly flexible and foster rapid development through their loosely coupled modular architecture. They not only enhance the development team efficiency and productivity, but they are also very agile, independent so they can be deployed, maintained with ease. With the cloud and container deployment strategies, microservices are built to be scalable and fault tolerant.

With all these notable advantages, then what really do we lose? Microservices make a lot of business sense: cost-efficiency during both development and production, highly resilient and scaling on demand. The real issues stem from the increased complexity of the many communication channels between microservices. REST APIs standardize these communications, which means APIs are that much more important to be developed, maintained and tested thoroughly and constantly. APIs should be designed to be immune from all the code churn, tested so that they are rock solid and are secured. We also need new tools to be able to debug the whole distributed nature of the deployment.

Narrowing down, then here are the issues once we hone down to the nitty gritty – API testing, management of the APIs, visibility for distributed debugging and security testing. We can make policies, adopt development methodologies to mitigate some of these disadvantages, but really there is need for new development tools that can address these issues. Some of the complexities can be addressed by standardization, documentation and API management software. But that still leaves huge gaps in API testing, API security testing and API debugging. In the words of Cypher from The Matrix:

“Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy… because Kansas is going bye-bye!