The Real Challenges of Combining Microservices and DevOps (And How to Overcome Them)

Microservices and DevOps have changed the way we build software, making it faster and more scalable. In fact, A study by Gartner shows that, by 2025, 90% of new applications will use microservices. But while the combination sounds great in theory, many companies do struggle to get it right.

Shifting from a monolithic system to a microservices architecture, while adopting DevOps can bring unexpected challenges. Teams often face issues like managing too many services, debugging errors across different systems, securing APIs, and ensuring smooth deployments. If not handled properly, these challenges can slow down development and cause serious delays.

In this article, we’ll break down the top five challenges of combining microservices and DevOps and how to solve them effectively.

Top 5 Challenges Of Combining Microservices And DevOps

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the five key challenges businesses may face while combining microservices and DevOps:

1. Microservices Can Get Too Complicated to Handle

Microservices offer great flexibility, but they also introduce a lot of moving parts. Unlike monolithic systems, where everything is centralized, microservices require managing multiple independent services, each with its own:

✅ Dependencies – Different libraries, frameworks, and versions for each service.
✅ Data stores – Separate databases or data models that must stay in sync.
✅ Configurations – Unique settings that need to be managed across environments.

As your system grows, so does the complexity. Without proper automation and standardization, managing microservices can easily get out of hand, leading to slow deployments and added operational overheads.

How to Fix It:

• Use service discovery tools (like Consul or Eureka) to automatically track where services are running.
  
• Implement API gateways (Kong, AWS API Gateway) to simplify and secure service-to-service communication.
  
• Adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform or CloudFormation to ensure consistency.

Remember, If you don’t tackle complexity early, it will slow your entire system down.

2. Debugging & Observability Are Major Pain Points

In a monolith architecture, if something breaks, you know exactly where to look. However, with microservices, a failure in one service can trigger failures in others. This makes troubleshooting a tough task because:

❌ Logs are scattered across different services.
❌ Errors don’t always show up in the service that caused them.
❌ Tracking a request’s journey across multiple services is tough.

When teams can’t catch issues quickly, it adds more downtime and slows development. Poor observability can also lead to “blame games” between teams, as no one knows exactly where the problem lies.

How to Fix It:

• Implement centralized logging with DevOps tools like ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
  
• Use distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin) to follow requests across services.
  
• Set up real-time monitoring dashboards with Prometheus and Grafana.

Without proper observability, debugging is like searching for a light switch in the dark.

3. Security Becomes a Bigger Concern

With microservices, security is no longer about protecting a single system, but, now you have to protect multiple independent services that communicate through APIs. This creates more attack surfaces, and common risks include:

⚠️ Unauthorized access—Microservices often expose APIs that hackers can exploit.
⚠️ Data leaks—Different services store and exchange data, increasing the risk of exposure.
⚠️ Misconfigurations—Security settings must be correctly applied across multiple services.

If security isn’t integrated properly into the architecture, one weak point can compromise the entire infrastructure.

How to Fix It:

• Follow the Zero Trust Security Model, where every service must authenticate every request.
  
• Automate security testing within CI/CD pipelines (DevSecOps).
  
• Encrypt API communications using mTLS (Mutual TLS) and OAuth2 for secure authentication.

Security isn’t something you add later, it needs to be built into your architecture from day one.

4. Deploying Updates Without Downtime Is Harder

In monolithic systems, deploying updates is relatively straightforward. However, in microservices, a bad deployment in one service can break multiple dependent services. Common problems include:

🚨 Version mismatches—If one service updates its API, other services, depending on it, might break.
🚨 Unexpected failures—A bug in one microservice can cause cascading failures across the system.
🚨 Difficult rollbacks—Rolling back a single microservice update without affecting others can be tricky.

Without a well-planned deployment strategy, updates can cause unnecessary downtime and frustrate both users and developers.

How to Fix It:

• Maintain independent CI/CD pipelines for each microservice to allow parallel development.
  
• Use Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI/CD for automated deployments.
  
• Implement feature flags to enable phased rollouts without disrupting production.

Without a proper deployment strategy, even a small mistake can cause major downtime.

5. Keeping Data Consistent Across Services

Monolithic applications have a single database, ensuring strong consistency. But with microservices, each service owns its own data, which can lead to data inconsistency issues if not handled correctly.

How to Fix It:

• Use event-driven architecture—Kafka and RabbitMQ help services stay in sync.
  
• Implement the Saga pattern for distributed transactions.
  
• Design loosely coupled data stores to minimize dependencies between services.

Without proper data consistency, your services will constantly be out of sync.

Conclusion

Bringing microservices and DevOps together can improve software development, but it also comes with challenges. Managing complexity, debugging issues, securing APIs, and handling deployments require careful planning.

The best way to overcome the challenges of combining microservices and DevOps is through automation, strong security, and good monitoring. Many companies choose to hire DevOps engineers who can:

✅ Set up automation and CI/CD pipelines.
✅ Improve security and monitoring.
✅ Ensure smooth deployments and quick rollbacks.

With the right expertise, businesses can successfully integrate microservices and DevOps for a faster, more scalable development process.