Managing Technical Debt in a Microservice Architecture

Adopting a microservice architecture is a great way to improve scalability and resilience in software systems, but it introduces new challenges, one of which is managing technical debt.

When we talk about tech debt, we’re referring to the imperfections and shortcuts developers use in their code base, which becomes bad code over time. When these imperfections are left unaddressed, they can lead to longer development cycles, increased maintenance costs, bugs, etc.

Technical debt has plagued the software industry since the early days and continues to do so today. This article explains technical debt, how it occurs, and how to manage tech debt in a microservice architecture.

What is Technical Debt?

Originally coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992, Technical debt is the inevitable accumulation of code flaws and bad design decisions implemented on an application. This can be something as trivial as using a less efficient algorithm or hardcoding values rather than using variables.

If ignored, the amount of technical debt accumulates over time and leads to many problems, including decreased performance, higher maintenance costs, inability to compete in the market effectively, and even system-wide failures.

How is Technical Debt Incurred?

There are so many ways technical debt can be accrued. But here are some of the most frequent ways:

● Lack of time: If you are under pressure to deliver a feature quickly and can’t afford to spend too much time on it, then the chances are that you will incur technical debt because you’ll be focused on shipping the feature in time instead of following best practices.

● Lack of knowledge: If you don’t know how to write reliable or robust code, then there is no way you will be able to avoid incurring technical debt. Additionally, when developers don't understand the larger picture or have a grasp on all of the capabilities of the product, then technical debt can be introduced unintentionally due to know knowing how some pieces are tied together or work.

● Lack of motivation: There may be times when nobody on your team feels motivated enough about what they’re building, so they end up taking lots of shortcuts just to get the work done, and this often leads to accumulating more technical debt.

● Lack of resources: If your development team lacks the necessary skills or experience in a particular technology, they’ll most likely not invest time into finding solutions for problems they might encounter while working with that technology since it could result in additional technical debt. For example, even if using SonarQube might help the developers in detecting areas in the code base that need improvement, you might want to avoid using this tool if the developers on your development team don’t have the expertise using SonarQube.

How to Manage Technical Debt in a Microservice Architecture

Even though the modularity of the microservice architecture makes it challenging to identify and manage technical debt, this section highlights several recommended ways to effectively manage tech debt in a microservice architecture.

Implement small, autonomous services: In a microservices environment, each service is a self-contained unit of functionality, so it’s essential to ensure that each service is small, focused, robust and scalable. This will make them easier to maintain and update, and it will be less difficult to track down the source of any problems. The components of your application should be loosely coupled, i.e., there should be minimal dependency between the components, and you should also know which microservices depend on which microservice(s), as this will guide you towards making informed decisions.

Implement feature flags: You can configure microservices with a feature named “feature toggle” for selectively enabling and disabling features. Feature flags allow you to toggle features on and off without redeploying your entire system. This can be helpful if you need to disable a feature causing problems quickly or isolating new features. However, to avoid technical debt by using feature flags the user must maintain them otherwise, you are creating technical debt.

Conduct code reviews: Use code reviews to evaluate and manage debt. This involves having team members review code for potential problems and suggest how to fix them. This can help to catch and fix debt early before it becomes too expensive or difficult to fix. When you need to make a significant change to a microservice, refactor the code incrementally so you can quickly revert if required. And linking it back to the lack of knowledge problem we mentioned earlier…you may miss something because of lack of knowledge, but someone else can identify technical debt because they may have a broader understanding, so code reviews matter!

Perform automated testing: You can use automated testing to identify and track technical debt in your application. This involves writing automated tests for your microservices so you can quickly catch any regressions introduced by code changes, running automated tests regularly, and monitoring the results.

Perform canary releases: Another excellent way to manage technical debt is to perform canary releases. When performing a canary release, you’ll deploy the latest code to a small group of users before rolling it out to everyone else. This allows you to test new code in a production environment before making it available to everyone. Any problems you find here can be fixed before it affects your entire user base.

Create a policy to deal with technical debt: This policy should define how and when tech debt can be accrued and how it will be paid off. Make sure that everyone on your team knows the policy and the importance of controlling technical debt.

Conclusion

You often cannot disentangle technical debt from a software development project because there’s always a trade-off between delivering quality and timeliness. But it is always important to remember that if technical debts are left unchecked, they can quickly spiral out of control and significantly impact the quality and stability of your microservice architecture, and the time to market of your product will increase.

With a clear understanding of technical debt, good communication, and collaboration among teams, you can start implementing the processes and utilizing tools that will enable you to effectively manage technical debt in a microservice architecture.

I hope you learned about technical debt and how it can be managed effectively in a microservice architecture. If you have any questions or concerns, you can leave a comment.

Telepresence: Rapid development & testing of microservices

Building and testing your microservice-based application becomes complex when you can no longer run everything locally due to resource requirements. Moving to the cloud for testing is a no-brainer, but how do you synchronize your local changes against your remote Kubernetes environment? By using Telepresence!

Telepresence redirects network traffic from a service in the cloud to a service or container on your local machine, merging the benefits of cloud and local test environments. This means you can run integration tests locally instead of waiting on a remote deployment.