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You are required to research and write a report focused on the specific challenges and issues...

You are required to research and write a report focused on the specific challenges and issues that arise owing to the use of microservices architecture as a software development philosophy. The report length is 1500 words (+/- 10%). You are also required to identify and include risk mitigation strategies that can be applied to minimise privacy and security risk in microservices-architected environments

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Answer #1

write a report focused on the specific challenges and issues that arise owing to the use of microservices architecture as a software development philosophy

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Over the past 18 months we’ve seen increasing attention placed on microservices. Standard bearers such as Netflix and Facebook have highlighted how microservices can be used to create more nimble and responsive software applications.At Belatrix we have just published a whitepaper examining microservices and outline some of their many benefits for tech organizations. However it is also clear that despite the benefits of modularization and containerization, many organizations continue to struggle with microservices.

The computing world has seen a vast adoption of the microservices software architecture in an effort to enhance software scalability and efficiency. However, implementing such an architecture requires exemplary expertise; a team that can develop complex system with optimal agility. While microservices implementation is an idea that has been in existence for quite a while, the recent buzz on social media, conference tracks, and empirical evidence points out the latter to be a computing model that can greatly enhance software performance. Nevertheless, building a software that is reliant on this architecture is not a walk in the park.

Before delving into the challenges, it is commendable to focus on some of the benefits of using the microservices architecture in software development.

  • Different developers can work independently on the same project, with each focusing on one or a set of different microservices whose collaborative implementation with other microservices from other developers would deliver the desired functionality of the system. This shortens the software development life cycle, leading to fast delivery of the software.
  • Through the use of the backward compatibility concept, it is possible to ensure constant releases while still maintaining system availability and stability.
  • Microservices software development approach often entails loose coupling, thereby ensuring that the integrated elements for collaboration purposes only depend on one another to the “least extent practicable.”
  • Microservices architecture can allow for the independent development of the individual services, thereby enabling the use of the most appropriate development methodologies and tools.
  • At the services level, the entire system is built on independent subcomponents with each subcomponent focussing on excellent execution a particular task; this makes such a system highly efficient

Besides the benefits that are ultimately overwhelming, there exist various challenges and issues

Just as the name indicates, microservices-based application comprises of numerous tiny independent services that are integrated with each other to offer the desired software functionalities. While these tiny individual services may be simple, there is a significant complexity that arises from their interaction for them to work collaboratively in an effort to orchestrate the desired business operations through them. While in practice, the idea of microservices works excellently, in reality, the complexity exhibited by the latter is commendable.

Expert Skills in Development and Operations (DevOps) are required

  • To begin with, applications developed based on the microservices concept have to be highly effective, and, therefore, it is critical for the development team to remain operations and production oriented since a microservices application requires tight integration with its environmental context. This implies that the development and operations must be compounded by emphasizing the collaboration and communication of the system development engineers and other Information Technology personnel, while still ensuring automation of the software delivery process and infrastructural changes.
  • On a different note, the use of this architecture in some instances may imply that some services may require their own data stores, especially where different programming environments or languages have been used to develop different microservices, This implies that the existent database administrator only conversant with management of data stores of monolithic applications may need to be replaced with programmers with a better knowledge of how to develop, test, optimize and deploy both SQL and NoSQL databases
  • In most cases, it is essentially difficult to find developers with impeccable programming skills across discrete development environments, an aspect that increases the magnitude of the challenge in the adoption of the microservices application development approach.

Operations Overhead

  • Unlike a monolithic application whose deployment and management is seemingly easier, a microservices-based application has numerous independent services that have to be developed and tested to in potentially different development environments. This implies that significant effort is required to ensure the resilience of the developed application and avoid any failovers. This implies that the higher the number of services and processes, the more complex it becomes in integrating the microservices and ensuring optimal efficiency of the system. Such an aspect increases its operations overhead, especially when compared to a monolithic application that can otherwise carry out the similar functionality while retaining a high throughput.
  • Synchronizing all the microservices, therefore, require impeccable operations and monitoring infrastructure. This implies that not only must the application server stay up and running, but also it is crucial to ensure that thousands of processes executed by the microservices run smoothly, do not cause any deadlocks and there is sufficient disk space. This may be a very challenging task.
  • From a software development perspective, there are presently not many open source tools, frameworks, and models to support microservices dependent software. This, therefore, implies that any team embracing such an approach to system development may end up investing significantly on custom development for the micro services to convey out the intended services before a functional system that bears business value is developed.

Tacit Interfaces

  • As mentioned earlier, a microservices-based system is composed of tiny micro services that are integrated and collaborate to carry out the intended processes and offer the required functionality. This implies that the micro services have to perfectly communicate. Such an aspect bears the concept of interfaces whenever the micro concept model is used in an effort to ensure message are exchanged between the services in the same format and bearing the same meaning for efficient execution of tasks. This further complicates the development of the system.
  • Therefore, whenever a change is effected in one microservice with respect to semantics and syntax, the other microservices also need to be readjusted in order to correspond with the change. In reality, this may entail reprogramming different components of the system then recompiling and testing. While backward compatibility may be a sure way of avoiding such challenges, in some instances it may not apply, especially where staged releases are unwelcomed by the business requirements
  • In the event that some interfaces are updated, and others are not, the microservices collaboration synchronization may fall out. Therefore, when effecting changes that affect the microservices communication, the effect of altering the messaging formats and other call procedures may become significantly difficult to visualize.

Complexities Associated with Distributed Computing

  • From a development perspective, microservices implementation borrows the concept of a distributed system, whereby application tends to hide the system complexity to the users as much as possible. However, beneath the front end is an integrated set of components working in synchrony and making numerous remote procedure calls in real time.
  • From a distributed computing perspective, there are numerous challenges that have to be considered and which may not exist in monolithic applications. These include but not limited to varying loads within the software tiers, versioning, and asynchronicity, an unreliability of the network, fault tolerance and network latency among others. Effective programming for these properties ensures graceful degradation of the applications as well as backward compatibility; these may not be achieved in the monolithic approach, an aspect that makes a microservices application more available and reliable.
  • This, however, presents an additional challenge for the software developer as they have to think about and develop these components, which are definitely inexistent in monolithic applications. Essentially, distributed systems are significantly challenging to develop test and deploy as compared to the monolithic apps.

Team Effort Duplication

  • Owing to the nature of the architecture, in some applications, it is crucial to share different resources such as the dependent libraries and packages among the services. While this may be highly useful and efficient in applications whose microservices have been developed in a relatively same development environment, it may not work in a polyglot context, whereby different microservices may have been developed in different programming environments. Such an aspect leads to the concept of coupling, whereby there would be the need to sustain the tacit interfaces between the microservices by running them in parallel. From an analytical perspective, coupling significantly reduces the perceived benefits of the microservices architecture.
  • To deal with the monolithic application challenges, some development teams tend to duplicate the business logic component of a system across different modules, an aspect that jeopardizes software engineering principles. This implies that designing, developing and deploying a microservices system requires patience, determination, and commitment.

Challenges in Asynchronicity

  • As discussed, microservices-based applications often tend to be asynchronous as compared to monolithic applications, and often leverage on parallelism and interfacing to offer their functionality. Indeed, microservices-based applications are therefore more efficient and reliable when handling tasks that can be decomposed into distinct subtasks that can be executed without a particular order and at different times.
  • On the other hand, tasks that have to be executed transactionally or synchronously in a microservices architecture, which is often asynchronous, the computation paradigm gets complex, characterized by the need for correlation ID management as well as distributed transactions and concurrency control to make sure the required actions or tasks are executed together

Challenges in Application Testing

  • Owing to the many microservices that have to be developed and tested and which evolve at different paces characterized by canary releases, consistent recreation of the testing environment for either automated or manual testing is usually challenging. The addition of the asynchronicity aspect, which is often associated with microservices architecture as well as dynamic messaging loads for interfacing purposes, it becomes significantly difficult to test the developed microservices system before deploying it into the production environment.
  • While it is possible to test independent microservices, it may be significantly difficult in a dynamic environment, especially whenever there is the emergence of indistinct behaviors from the microservices interactions, and which may be hard to identify or speculate.

some additional challenges including:

  1. Operations and Infrastructure: The development group has to work closer with operations more than ever before. Otherwise, things will spin out of control due to the multitude of operations going on at once.
  2. Support: It is significantly harder to support and maintain a microservices setup than a monolithic app. Each one may be made from a wide variety of frameworks and languages. The infinite complexities of support influence decisions on adding services. If a team member wants to create a new service in an esoteric language, it impacts the whole team because they have to make sure it can work with the existing setup.
  3. Monitoring: When you add additional new services, your ability to maintain and configure monitoring for them becomes a challenge. You will have to lean on automation to make sure monitoring can keep up with the changes in the scale of services.
  4. Security of Application: The proliferation of services in this architecture creates more soft targets for hackers, crackers and criminals. With a variety of operating systems, frameworks and languages to keep track of, the security group has their hands full making sure the system is not vulnerable.
  5. Requests: One way to send data between services is using request headers. Request headers can contain details like authentication that ultimately reduce the number of requests you need to make. However, when this is happening across a myriad of services, it can increase the need for coordination with members of other teams.
  6. Caching: Caching helps reduce the number of requests you’ll need to make. Caching requests that involve a multitude of services can grow complicated quickly, necessitating communication from different services and their development teams.
  7. Fault Tolerance: The watchword with microservices is “interdependence.” Services have to be able to withstand outright failures and inexplicable timeouts. Failures can multiply quickly, creating a cascading effect through some services, potentially spiking services needlessly. Fault tolerance in this environment is much more complicated than a monolithic system.

Risk mitigation strategies that can be applied to minimise privacy and security risk in microservices-architected environments

Strategies to minimize privacy and security risks in microservice architure environments

Authentication: Authentication to microservices APIs that have access to sensitive data should not be done simply by using API keys. Access to such APIs should require authentication tokens that have either been digitally signed (e.g., client credentials grant) or that is verified with an authoritative source. Additionally, some services may require either single-use tokens or short-lived tokens (tokens that expire after a short time period) to limit the damage a compromised token can cause.

Authentication tokens should be handle-based, cryptographically signed, or protected by an HMAC scheme.Every API Key that is used in the application should have restrictions specified both for the applications (e.g., mobile app, IP address) and the set of APIs where they can be used.The restriction scope for functionality of every API Key should be commensurate with the level of assurance provided during identity proofing, whether it be machine or human driven identity proofing.

When stateless authentication tokens (e.g., JSON Web Tokens (JWT)) are used by implementing shared libraries associated with a microservice, the following security precautions must be observed: (a) the token expiry times should be as short as possible since they determine the duration of the session and an active session cannot be revoked, and (b) the token secret key must not be a part of the library code, it must be a dynamic variable represented by an environmental variable or specified in an environment data file. The key value should be stored in a data vault solution.

If standards-based techniques such as OAuth or OpenID connect are implemented, they must be deployed securely.

Access management: Access policies to all APIs and their resources should be defined and provisioned to an access server. Access policies at a coarse level of granularity say “Permit to Call for a given set of addressable functionalities” should be defined and enforced at the initial API gateway while authorizations at the finer level of granularity (e.g., related to domain of the particular microservices’ business logic) should be defined and enforced closer to the location of the microservices (e.g., at the microgateway) or sometimes at the microservice itself.

Caching Mechanism: It may be appropriate to allow microservices to cache policy data; this cache should be only relied upon when an access server is unavailable and should expire after a duration appropriate for the environment/infrastructure.

The access server should be capable of supporting fine-grained policies.•Access decisions from the access server should be conveyed to individual and sets of microservices through standardized tokens encoded in a platform-neutral format (e.g., OAuth 2.0 token encoded in JSON format). The token can be either a handle-based token or an assertion bearing token.

The scope of internal authorization tokens appended by the micro gateway or decision point to each request should be carefully controlled; for example, in a request for transaction, the internal authorization token should be limited in scope to only involve the API endpoints that must be accessed for that transaction.

The API gateway can be leveraged to centralize enforcement of authentication and access control for all downstream microservices, eliminating the need to provide authentication and access control for each of the individual services. If this design is chosen, any component suitably positioned on the network can make anonymous connections to the services bypassing the API gateway and its protections. Mitigating controls such as mutual authentication should be leveraged to prevent direct, anonymous connections to the services."

Secure communication: Clients should not be configured to call their target services directly but rather be configured to point to the single gateway URL.

Client to API gateway as well as Service to Service communication should take place after mutual authentication and be encrypted (e.g., using mTLS protocol).Frequently interacting services should create keep-alive TLS connections

Security monitoring: Security monitoring should be performed at both the gateway and service level to detect, alert and respond to inappropriate behavior, for example a bearer token reuse attack and injection attacks. Further, input validation errors and extra parameters errors, crashes and core dumps must be logged. A class of software that can accomplish this is the OWASP AppSensor which could potentially be implemented in the gateway, service mesh and microservice itself.

A central dashboard displays the status of various services and the network segments that link them. At a minimum, the dashboard should show security parameters such as input validation failures and unexpected parameters that are obvious signs of injection attack attempts.A baseline for normal, uncompromised behavior in terms of the outcome of business logic decisions, contact attempts, and other behavior should be created. The placement and capabilities of IDS nodes should be such that deviations from this baseline can be detected.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while microservices approach in application development is deemed to produce more reliable and highly functional software, the development process is quite challenging as compared to monolithic applications . The latter advocates for impeccable DevOps skills by the development team, characterized by intensive monitoring of the microservices in an effort to spot any anomalies in the microservices integration and collaboration to take action and deliver the desired business functionality. At AuroraSolutions, we strive in ensuring that you get the best out of your microservice based software by offering you expert advice based on our long standing experience in the industry.

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