Actually what you describe here is mostly why I think that it was stupid to rebuilt otto.de from scratch. microservices are a improvment over a monolith inside a bigger Application with a big team. Microservices are happening caused by team sizes and management overhead, it had nothing to do that a monolith is bad at all. And that's why I dislike all the fancy posts about them, nothing stops you from doing all the same things with a monolith, especially when you have a small team. As your team grows you mostly change to a service oriented architecture and evolve from there. it mostly isn't a good practice to start with a microservice architecture without having a monolith that you need to split (I know there are some but stil.. it's hard to say that the overhead it produces with a "few" people is valueable). Actually a lot inside this article explains what parts were easy, however the hard parts about such systems are mostly not written anywhere near, which is most managing logs, faulty systems, automatic routing, versioning, database migrations if the system has a database, updating servers, service discovery, service load-balancing, service monitoring, edge service router and that are prolly just a few of the dozen things which makes such systems harder.