Top SRE Online Institute  Site Reliability Engineering Training
                     Common Failure Modes in Microservices Architecture
Identifying and Mitigating System Weaknesses
+91-7032290546
Introduction to Microservices
 Definition: Microservices is an architectural style that structures 
an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.
 Benefits: Scalability, independent deployment, faster time to 
market.
• Challenge: While flexible, microservices introduce new types of 
failure modes.
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Service-to-Service Communication Failures
 Description: Microservices often rely on synchronous or 
asynchronous communication.
 Failures:
oNetwork latency or timeout
o Service unavailability
oMisconfigured endpoints
 Impact: Cascading failures, poor performance
• Mitigation: Timeouts, retries, circuit breakers (e.g., Hystrix)
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Data Inconsistency & Distributed Transactions
 Issue: Each service may manage its own database, making global 
consistency hard.
 Failures:
o Partial updates
o Lost or duplicated messages
o Dirty reads/writes
• Mitigation: Saga patterns, eventual consistency, idempotent operations
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Dependency Failures
 Cause: One service depends on another (e.g., payment -> 
inventory -> shipping).
 Failures:
oDownstream service crashes
oVersion mismatch
 Mitigation:
oGraceful degradation
oAPI versioning
• Fallback strategies
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Service Discovery & Load Balancing Failures
 Issue: Microservices require dynamic discovery and load distribution.
 Failures:
o Stale service registry
o DNS misconfiguration
o Load balancer bottlenecks
 Mitigation:
o Health checks
• Self-healing service registries (e.g., Consul, Eureka)
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Configuration & Deployment Failures
 Cause: Each service has its own configuration, often stored centrally.
 Failures:
o Incorrect config values
o Misconfigured secrets or credentials
o Inconsistent deployment pipelines
 Mitigation:
o Configuration management tools (e.g., Spring Cloud Config)
o Canary deployments
• CI/CD with automated rollback
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Observability & Debugging Challenges
 Issue: With many services, tracing the source of a failure is difficult.
 Failures:
o Lack of centralized logging
o No correlation IDs
o Poor metrics/alerts
 Mitigation:
o Distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Jaeger)
o Centralized logging (e.g., ELK Stack)
• Monitoring dashboards (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana)
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Conclusion & Best Practices
 Summary:
o Microservices offer flexibility but introduce new failure modes.
o Resilience patterns and observability are key to success.
 Best Practices:
o Design for failure
o Automate monitoring and recovery
o Regularly test failure scenarios (chaos engineering)
• Final Thought: "Build systems that fail gracefully, not ones that 
never fail."
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
For More Information About 
Site Reliability Engineering
Address:- Flat no: 205, 2nd Floor,
   Nilagiri Block, Aditya Enclave,  Ameerpet, 
Hyderabad-16
   Ph. No: +91-998997107
     Visit: www.visualpath.in
      E-Mail: [email protected]
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546
Thank You
Visit: www.visualpath.in 
www.visualpath.in +91-7032290546