If microservices seem like a panacea at this point, we should also note that this approach does not come without its own set of issues. Whether the tradeoff is worth it or not depends heavily on an overall organizational approach.

As mentioned earlier, stability and error detection comprise a big production-level win for microservices. But if you think of the flip side of applications not breaking, it could also mean that issues go hidden for longer than they otherwise would. It's hard to ignore the entire site being down, but it could be hours before anyone realizes that e-mails have not been sent, unless some very robust logging is in place.

But there are other big pros to microservices. For one, utilizing an external standard communication protocol (REST, for example) means that you're not locked into a single language.

If, for example, some part of your application can be written better in Node than in Go, you can do that without having to rewrite an entire application. This is a frequent temptation for developers: rewriting the whole thing because the new and shiny language app or feature is introduced. Well, microservices safely enable this behavior—it allows a developer or a group of developers to try something without needing to go deeper than the specific function they wish to write.

This, too, comes with a potentially negative scenario—since the application components are decoupled, so can the institutional knowledge around them be decoupled. Few developers may know enough to keep the service operating ideally. Other members of the group may lack the language knowledge to jump in and fix critical errors.

One final, but important, consideration is that microservice architecture generally means a distributed environment by default. This leads us to the biggest immediate caveat, which is the fact that this situation almost always means that eventual consistency is the name of the game.

Since every message must depend on multiple external services, you're subject to several layers of latency to get a change enacted.