As this is a discussion about the microservice/monolithic dichotomy, I'm going to do a little self promotion.

I'm working on a project called Lightbus which I'm hoping will find a use for applications which sit somewhere between microservice & monolithic:

http://lightbus.org

https://github.com/adamcharnock/lightbus

I'm aware that this has all been done before to an extent, so I'm trying not to reinvent the wheel and learn from the past. Advice, critique, or encouragement is very welcome indeed.