Distributed cloud applications (aka microservices) have introduced an enormous amount of complexity into the design and operation of cloud software. What used to manifest itself as complexity hidden within a single process or runtime now finds itself spread across tens or hundreds of loosely coupled services. While all of these services can use different languages and can scale independently from one another, the distributed nature can often make the app as a whole hard to navigate, hard to deploy, and hard secure.
This new complexity makes it increasingly difficult to manage and contribute to cloud-native applications and beckons questions as to how we can maintain healthy cloud software. How can we take advantage of the benefits of service-oriented design without introducing friction and cost elsewhere?