I believe that microservices are changing the way we think about software and DevOps. I am not saying that it is the solution to every problem you have, but sharing the complexity of your stack between programs that work together (Unix Philosophy) could resolve many of them.

Adding a containerization layer to your microservices architecture using Docker or rkt and an orchestration tool (Swarm, K8S ..) will really simplify the whole process from development to operations and help you manage the networking and increase your stack performance, scalability and self-healing ..

I — like many of you — adopt the philosophy of a single process per container. This is what I am also considering for this tutorial, so inter-process communication falls into the same thing as microservices containers; where each microservice runs a single isolated process that do one thing and do it well and communicate with other processes (Unix Philosophy).

The UNIX philosophy is documented by Doug McIlroy in the The Bell System Technical Journal from 1978:

• Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
• Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
• Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
• Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.

By experience, I believe that developing software while keeping in mind the Unix philosophy principle will avoid you a lot of headaches.