Microservices Architecture Assignment: Identification of Issues

Question

Task: 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.

Answer

Introduction
The primary concern of this research on microservices architecture assignment is microservice architecture and its associated challenges. Microservices can also be identified to be an architectural style that structures a particular software application following the involvement of a collection of services along withloosely coupled services, high maintainable services, independently deployed, organised around the capabilities of a business that is owned by a small team. This particular service ensures the reliable, rapid, and frequent delivery of different complex applications (Kallergis et al., 2020).Microservices architecture has confronted a considerable shift from the existing monolithic software applications architecture in relation todifferent microservicesthat are architected for addressing different functions (Ferna?ndez-Garci?aAntonio Jesu?s et al., 2017). In this report of microservices architecture assignment, the different issues faced by microservices architecture in the case of its implementation will be addressed. It will further examine the potential privacy issues existing in this case of microservices architecture assignment. These issues are to be addressed in order to assess the mitigation as well as the management procedure of the same. On completion of the entire analysis procedure, a conclusion is to be drawn.

Issues and challenges in a microservices architecture
Microservices architecture is to be identified as a system that involves much more complexity than legacy systems. The environment in relation to microservices becomes more complex due to the necessity of managing and supporting many different moving parts. Some of the issues that might arise in the case of microservices architecture assignmentwould include:

Management of Microservices
With the increase in the numbers of microservices, the procedure for managing the same gets more challenging and complicated. It becomes important that the management procedure therein is planned before the building of microservices is completed(Ferna?ndez-Garci?a Antonio Jesu?s et al., 2017). The modularity helps this procedure, and things, in this case, can get out of hand very quickly if not managed properly. Many leaders have previously stated that the mismanagement in relation to these services is identified to be a problem faced at the time of the initial stages in relation to the transformation from the monolithic applications.

Monitoring
The traditional forms regarding the monitoring, as well as diagnostics, will not be able to make alignment with microservices due to the presence of multiple services that are making up the same functionality supported by an application (Davy&Wouter., 2017). With a problem arising in the considered application, identifying the root cause can be identified to be of the challenging factors if one does not own a means in relation to the procedure of monitoring as well as tracking the particular path in relation to the implementation of the microservices that were traversed regarding a specific request based on a user interface.

Embracing DevOps Culture
Embracing DevOps culture can be identified to be another challenge faced in this case. Different teams need autonomy, agility, and continuous delivery for being capable of delivering initial releases as well as consecutive iterative changes. In this case of microservices architecture assignment, the lack of DevOps culture can lead towards bottling up releases as well as put an impact on the overall time in relation to the market and ultimate execution or implementation of the application(Kallergis et al., 2020).

Fault Tolerance
It is crucial that individual services therein do not lead towards bringing down the entire system. Fault tolerance, in that case of microservices architecture assignment, is another vital consideration that is to be taken into account at the service level, and management of the same is therefore critical. Based on the complexity related to a microservices environment as well as the complex dependency chains failure in this situation is inevitable(Roca et al., 2020). Microservices thereby need to be able to withstanding both internal as well as external failures.

Testing
Testing can be identified to be much more complex in the case of a microservices environment based on the existence of the different services and their integration, as well as interdependencies. The team members participating and responsible for the assurance of quality need to thereby be knowledgeable in relation to the channels of communications among services for having full coverage in relation to their test cases.

What are the potential privacy issues identified in the microservices architecture assignment?

• In the case of a monolith system considered herein microservices architecture assignment, there is one single thing that is to be secured, and that's manageable. On the contrary, in the case of microservices, there are many different aspects to be taken into consideration, and in that case, the attack surface thereby increases the manifold. In relation to each of those aspects, one needs to take care of the perceived weaknesses that might be exposed(Srirama, et al., 2020). Whether this is generally the flaws existing in their design or just a simple security-related bug, or a plain old vulnerability in the case of supporting libraries. Also, one needs to think regarding the security testing in reaction to each one of them.
• In the case of monolithic architecture, for allowing the components being different in nature in relation to the application to collaborate, one just has method calls in relation to the OS process of the application. In the case of microservices, one would be exposing internal APIs regarding the logical application, and thereby it needs to ensure that they cannot be called with the existing malicious intent; and that would require a lot more effort for securing in comparison to a monolithic design (Xu et al., 2019).
• A monolithic approach uses a set of technologies that is well-known, which maybe not be the only one technology as the front-end might be found to be written otherwise than the backend; however, the numbers of technologies in this case involved therein is small as well as the company has maybe standardised in relation to them. This factor has vulnerability management issues existing in place (Roca et al., 2020). On the other hand, in the case of microservices, the user will be required to involve all the technologies therein. Even if one forces a certain standardisation in relation to the usability of the services, there will still be different versions regarding the selected technology stack around, as the individual services will possess different types of life-cycles.
• In the case of traditional approaches regarding security, one needs to examine the concept of control gates. In this case of microservices architecture assignment, each step in the case of a large software project will involve a security experts committee, and that generally assesses the movement of the project forward and measures the risk management as well as treatment and security controls or testing. Comparing the same in relation to the microservice approach, it requires team autonomy as well as end-to-end responsibility.

Analysis of the issues and potential mitigation
There are different best practices in relation to microservices security for avoiding these pitfalls, as identified above within the microservices architecture assignment. These practices are to be adopted while building microservices in order to mitigate these issues or manage the same.

• Practice defense-in-depth: Practice of defense-in-depth is to be recognised as a strategy in which different layers in relation to the security control that is introduced in the case of an application (Srirama, et al., 2020). The sensitive services would get layers in relation to the security cover; therefore a potential attacker who potentially has exploited one of existing microservices in the considered application will not be able to conduct the same in relation to another microservice as well as another layer existing in the application.
• Use the API gateway: In the case of a traditional microservices-based application, it is considered to be ideal that the consumers do not initiate communicating with the microservices in a direct manner; but an API gateway will be required to provide a single point in relation to the entry for traffic that will be directed to various microservices (Killalea, 2016). These gateways often tend to use authentication based on the token for managing the aspects that are owned by data privileges particular services.

Mitigation
An API Gateway can be taken into consideration for resolving these challenges. Additionally, there are several open sources as well as enterprise APIs existincludingApigee, Spring Cloud Gateway, Kong, WSO2, Okta and public cloud that would offerGCP, AWSand Azure etc(Srirama, et al., 2020). Custom solutions in that case can also be developed in relation to API security by using JWT token.

Conclusion
On the analysis of the examination presented in the microservices architecture assignment, it can be evaluated that there are different numbers of challenges faced in the case of microservices implementation. The implementation of microservices architecture has been identified to be a procedure that involves a lot more complex than the traditional system. The complexity has increased due to the necessity regarding management and support in relation to different moving parts involved with the microservices architecture, and some of these issues have been evaluated in the present report on microservices architecture assignment. These kinds of issues involve the management of microservices, monitoring, embracing DevOps culture, fault tolerance, and testing. Additionally, the related privacy issues have been recognised that are identified at the time of implementation of microservices architecture. The evaluation of these issues has helped in the case of leading towards the identification of potential management systems regarding the same. It has been testified herein microservices architecture assignment that with the implementation of the mitigation procedures will help in the case of implementing a successful microservices architecture in an application and effective execution of the same. Therefore, it is to be stated that in order to lead towards a successful and effective implementation of microservices architecture, it is vital to consider the aforementioned risk management strategies.?

References
Davy, P., &Wouter, J. (2017).Access control with delegated authorization policy evaluation for data-driven microservice workflows. microservices architecture assignmentFuture Internet, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9040058

Ferna?ndez-Garci?a Antonio Jesu?s, Iribarne, L., Corral, A., Criado, J., & Wang, J. Z. (2017). A microservice-based architecture for enhancing the user experience in cross-device distributed mashupuis with multiple forms of interaction. Universal Access in the Information Society, 18(4), 747–770. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-017-0606-0

Kallergis, D., Garofalaki, Z., Katsikogiannis, G., &Douligeris, C. (2020).Capodaz: a containerised authorisation and policy-driven architecture using microservices. Ad Hoc Networks, 104.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2020.102153

Killalea, T. (2016).The hidden dividends of microservices. Queue, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.1145/2956641.2956643

Roca, S., Sancho, J., Garci?a Jose?, &AlesancoA?lvaro.(2020). Microservicechatbot architecture for chronic patient support. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 102.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103305

Srirama, S. N., Adhikari, M., & Paul, S. (2020). Application deployment using containers with auto-scaling for microservices in cloud environment. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 160.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2020.102629

Xu, R., Jin, W., & Kim, D. (2019).Microservice security agent based on api gateway in edge computing. microservices architecture assignmentSensors (Basel, Switzerland), 19(22). https://doi.org/10.3390/s19224905