I'll throw this out there as something I see a lot of companies doing. Design by blog posts. Twitter / Netflix does this awesome thing we should too! A small 5 man team ends up with a system of 10+ micro services, service discovery, async message queues, SQL and NoSQL, Easticsearch, Redis... End up with a pretty expensive bill from AWS and a system that is very complicated to maintain / debug. Seriously most companies are fine with a monolith, or a monolith with a few micro services. Stop over engineering.