At Mara Group, I was responsible for building a lot of micro services. I use Laravel, Beanstalkd, Redis, MySQL, PHPUnit and PHPStorm. I learnt more on security, I had to build layers and layers of middleware to prevent people from trying to take down the service.
Finally, I had more experience managing servers, using haproxy and scaling beanstalkd. The best part about building a micro service for me is the Separation on Concerns it gives your application.