10 Microservices Rules I Wish I Knew Before My System Crashed
Why 90% of Microservices Fail (And 10 Rules to Join the 10%)
Hello guys, ever since Cloud computing started, Microservices has become a standard architecture for deploying software applications and why not, it goes hand-in-hand with Cloud computing when it comes to deployment and scalability.
Microservices offer a scalable and flexible way to build complex applications — but they also introduce new layers of complexity.
Unlike monoliths, microservices must communicate over the network, handle partial failures gracefully, and remain consistent despite being distributed.
That’s why reliability isn’t optional — it’s foundational.
In this article, I’ll walk you through 10 essential (non-negotiable) rules that engineers and architects should follow to build reliable microservices that can stand the test of scale, latency, and failure.
These rules are based on battle-tested practices observed in companies like Netflix, Uber, Stripe, and Amazon — and they apply to any production-grade microservice architecture.
10 Rules That Made Our Microservices 99.9% Reliable
Here is the summary of all these rules before we deep dive into each one
1. Isolate Failures with Timeouts and Circuit Breakers
Every service dependency is a potential point of failure. You should use timeouts to prevent long waits and circuit breakers to stop cascading failures. This helps your system stay responsive even when dependencies are struggling.
2. Make Services Idempotent
When a client retries a request, it shouldn’t cause duplicate side effects (like creating the same order twice).
Use idempotency keys or design your endpoints to be inherently idempotent.
This is especially crucial in payment, booking, and provisioning systems.
3. Use Bulkheads to Contain Resource Exhaustion
A bulkhead pattern ensures that one slow or failing service doesn’t take down the whole system.
Isolate critical resources like threads, memory, or CPU pools per service or functionality.
4. Apply Rate Limiting and Throttling
To avoid abuse, DoS attacks, or sudden spikes in usage, enforce limits on how many requests a user or service can make in a given time window.
This protects both your system and your users.
5. Prefer Asynchronous Communication Where Possible
Synchronous APIs create tight coupling and higher latency risks. Asynchronous messaging (using queues, topics, or event streams) improves decoupling, fault tolerance, and performance.
6. Always Design for Retries With Backoff and Jitter
Retries are inevitable in distributed systems.
Use exponential backoff and jitter to avoid retry storms (aka the thundering herd problem).
Blind retries can overload already-failing systems.
7. Use Health Checks and Readiness Probes
Integrate health and readiness checks so your orchestrator (like Kubernetes) knows when to route traffic — or when to restart a service.
This ensures that traffic only hits services that are actually ready.
8. Ensure Observability with Logs, Metrics, and Tracing
Logs tell you what happened, metrics tell you how often, and traces tell you where.
Together, they give you visibility into your system’s behavior.
Use tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or OpenTelemetry.
9. Design APIs to Be Backward-Compatible
Changing APIs in a distributed system is tricky.
Always evolve your APIs (e.g., add optional fields, deprecate carefully) to ensure backward compatibility and zero-downtime deployments.
10. Automate Chaos and Recovery Testing
Don’t wait for failure — simulate it.
Inject chaos using tools like Chaos Monkey to validate your assumptions.
Also, automate disaster recovery drills and validate failover plans frequently.
Conclusion
That’s all in this post guys about 10 essential rules to create a Reliable Microservices which can withstand test of time in production. Building reliable Microservices isn’t just about writing code — it’s about engineering resilience into every layer of your architecture.
These 10 rules help create systems that survive failure, scale gracefully, and earn user trust.
You can use the visual summary below to quickly recall these rules or share with your team:
All the best with your Microservices journey !!
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