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Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog contribution from software developer and tech writer Nahla Davies. She explores what containerized microservices are and shares her expert perspective on some of the strengths and challenges you’ll face when employing them.

Developing or improving apps using “microservices” — isolated and specific parts or functions of apps or software — is efficient and effective for many software development organizations. However, every company struggles with developing, testing, and deploying microservices regularly and with as few hiccups as possible. This is where containerized microservices can be helpful.

Containerization is the perfect complementary development practice for microservices. According to a 2018 survey, more than 64% of surveyed companies are adopting microservice architectures. If leveraged properly, containerization is an attribute because it helps you develop and operate microservices. But on the flip side, it also makes server provisioning and data storage a little more complex.

Therefore, organizations should only start using containerization for microservice development after fully analyzing the pros and cons, the challenges, and creating a strategy for overcoming the challenges in the future. Today, I’ll break each of these elements down in detail and explore potential strategies your company can use to implement containerized microservice development successfully.

Let’s hash it out.

Using containerized microservices is a newer way of architecting applications that has become increasingly popular over the last several years. In a nutshell, organizations or developers can create containerized microservices by applying individual application services within the same container environment. But what are containers and microservices? Before we get any further into this topic, let’s quickly define what each of these terms means. 

A container is an environment within an operating system that’s designed to allow multiple applications (and their dependencies, like their configuration files and libraries) to be deployed and run easily in isolated processes. (Note: this differs from traditional virtual machine environments that operate at the hardware level.) This allows software programs to be reliably run when moved from one computing environment to another. Regardless of whether an application is being run in the cloud or on a laptop, for example, the container mitigates any differences that exist between distributions in the operating systems. 

Microservices, on the other hand, are an approach to developing applications as a collection of smaller services. This is accomplished via lightweight APIs in a single interface. The advantages to using microservices include the fact that they: 

The many benefits of containerization — faster app testing, greater use of limited server resources, and significantly reduced overhead costs, to name a few — apply just as well for microservices development and testing as they do for other apps and code.

That said, your organization should know both the major advantages and potential drawbacks of containerized microservices before you start implementing them into your workflows or operations.

Containerized microservices can potentially provide your organization with many major benefits, including:

Overall, containerized microservices offer greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness compared to developing and testing multiple microservices using virtual machines only or entirely.

All that said, containerized microservices do have some potential drawbacks to consider, such as:

Because of these possible drawbacks, many developers use containerized microservices in most cases except when they have to deal with very small numbers of microservices. They may also choose virtual machine environments if they’re dealing with simple apps that have limited functionalities.

Should you choose to use containerized microservices, you’ll need a great strategy to ensure proper implementation across your organization.

Firstly, you’ll need to ensure that your cybersecurity doesn’t suffer from adopting container-based microservices. Remember, microservices in containerized environments can access a host server’s root capabilities if they are running in privileged mode. This permits them to have access directly to the root capabilities of the host. It won’t pay to take this possibility lightly, especially since cyber crimes and security breaches are up by about 11%. (Check out this cyber crime statistics article for other current cyber crime stats.)

Using container-based microservices also emphasizes the importance of good network policies and security context definitions. Your organization or cyber security team will need to ensure that containers are not accessible by unauthorized personnel. Frequent auditing or container image scans may be necessary.

Another key consideration of containerized microservices relates to container runtimes (a component in software designed to run containers on the operating system of your host). For the best results, your team should leverage a complete set of configuration management tools (like JuJu, Rudder, or SysAid). The more management tools you have, the better you can tailor or tweak your containerization development process for your needs and limitations.

Check out this video on using Juju, which is one example of a popular configuration management tool:

Similarly, try to avoid deploying container runtimes individually or on their own beyond the execution stages. Your runtime provider could influence the overall cost-effectiveness of containerized microservice development. The Open Container Initiative is a collaborative project that’s currently trying to establish common container platform standards — use it to ensure your container runtimes run as well as they can.

Be sure to get everyone up to speed on orchestration tools like Kubernetes. This tool can help you automate important automation tasks across your servers. Alternatively, you can use other server orchestrators aside from Kubernetes, which could be overkill or overly complex if you don’t need a high scale or a distributed architecture.

Your organization should also consider networking and communication issues that may arise. The microservices you develop will need to talk to one another or the central host server and operating system (OS). Service mechs may be able to handle requests between microservices using abstracted proxy components, solving this challenge.

Alternatively, if your containerized microservices communicate via external endpoints, you’ll need a dedicated communication portal. The portal will verify and relay requests between external components and prevent accidental security breaches. Keep in mind that hiring a dedicated developer to develop a unique portal could be pricey — you can expect to pay at least $45 an hour for a developer to do a task like this. 

Lastly, you may wish to invest in a load balancer (a networking solution designed to distribute traffic across several servers) if you anticipate high traffic between the containers.

Don’t forget the plan for external storage between containers. By its very nature, containerization requires data to vanish when each instance is set down. So you’ll need an external data storage mechanism to keep valuable data or progress intact.

Luckily, many of the orchestration tools mentioned above will come with data storage solutions. When comparing data storage solutions, review the features and attributes of each tool to choose the best orchestration tool for your organization’s needs.

At the end of the day, containers remain a popular way to deploy functional microservices, even if they bring a little extra complexity to the development table. It makes the testing and deployment of your software much more predictable. This is because you can use the same container (or environment) to host the software that you are testing or building for an upcoming deployment while using fewer resources than other options.  

Your organization’s developers should research commercial and open-source tools that can assist with containerized microservice development to make the most of this novel but necessary strategy.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Hashed Out by The SSL Store™ authored by Nahla Davies. Read the original post at: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/the-benefits-and-challenges-of-containerized-microservices/

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.

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