> It takes effort to keep a monolithic application set up this way Yeah, this is the problem and _why_ I think microservices are the way forward as it doesn't take effort because the programmer is forced into do the right thing. On project with many different types of coders (and lets face it we are all different) consistency drops off fast. Of course you can do it with monoliths but I'm coming from a "real world" scenario where there are many people with different levels of ability and different levels of giving a cr@p about code quality. Micro services let people who code badly to do it in isolation and let themselves be the only ones who have to suffer under it, and ultimately learn from it (if they are not fired first). Also decoupling in a monolith vs by deployment is really just which git repo the code lives in, which are next to each other in the same directory on your hard drive. If there is shared code factor it out as a library/module and install it into the projects that need it. Its not a big deal