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Research Paper | Information Technology | Volume 15 Issue 2, February 2026 | Pages: 603 - 609 | United States
Technical Limitations of Microservices Scaling and Ways to Overcome Them
Abstract: The article explores the fundamental limits of scalability in microservice architectures, arguing that microservices do not scale as an architectural property but only remain scalable while three operational planes- the data plane, transaction plane, and control/measurement plane- stay within stable regimes. Once any plane crosses a critical threshold, the system undergoes a phase transition from stable operation to instability, manifesting as unbounded queue growth, silent correctness violations, or self-interference caused by orchestration and observability overhead. The article leans on benchmark data, a few experiments, and earlier surveys. Queue growth slope - or consumer lag- is a main signal; it shows when the data path starts slipping. Other failures come from concurrency-related consistency bugs, or from monitoring tools pulling too many resources and getting in the way. What stands out is that systems often begin to fall apart well before maxing out hardware; coordination costs and shared state play a much bigger role. The text outlines a few mitigations: deferred commit with rollback in memory, SLOs based on queue trends, and evolving telemetry setups alongside system changes. Overall, the goal is to map where scale breaks- not in theory, but in actual deployments. The article will be useful to system architects, SREs, and researchers designing or evaluating large-scale microservice systems, providing concrete criteria for identifying real scalability limits and reframing "scaling" as a stability problem rather than a resource-provisioning problem.
Keywords: microservices scalability, distributed transactions, saga pattern, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), distributed systems performance
How to Cite?: Gleb Shkriabin, "Technical Limitations of Microservices Scaling and Ways to Overcome Them", Volume 15 Issue 2, February 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 603-609, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26207091555, DOI: https://dx.dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26207091555