[mrweasel]

There is also room for the in-between, not a monolith, but also not "micro" services. It is actually possible to have a number of services working together, each on their own a small monolith.

I've done multiple projects where we have fairly large service working together. Sometimes they function on their own, other times they hand of a task to another service in order to complete the entire process. Sometimes they need each other to enrich something, but if the other service isn't running that's okay for a short time.

It is also worth remembering that if all your microservice needs to be running at the same time, you just have a distributed monolith, which is so much worse than a regular monolith.