Challenges of implementing microservices

The challenges that encompass implementing microservice architecture can be summarized in one phrase: distributed system.

Is the functionality that you will implement will use a bunch of services throughout a network. You will have to deal with network delays and failures. What if the response is not immediate? Is the target service down or busy? How should we find out, and what we should do about it?

Should the data belong to one microservice? Easier said than done. We can make the database underlying the service consistent, but how do we propagate this information to other services that rely on this data?

Also, it is nice that each team can work independently, but what if we really need to implement cross-service functionality? That can become a pain: a cross-team endeavor that may introduce large architectural changes and substantially impact the whole architecture.

Let's assume that we managed to deal with the preceding problems and have a running system. What happens when an error occurs? We will have to analyze logs scattered around a number of services, also tracing network interactions between all of them.

So, how should you decide whether the microservice architecture is suitable for your application?