Choose languages and frameworks that developers are familiar with. Microservices are fine if you can rely on shared CI/CD infrastructure and automate execution

Choose languages and frameworks that developers are familiar with. Microservices are fine if you can rely on shared CI/CD infrastructure and automate execution properly, maintaining rapid build/test cycle times. They start to suck if people aren't familiar and everyone's laptop has to hold their own parallel multi-topology service prom regression test (^releases) every time you change a line of code... developer focus, flow and efficacy will be reduced. I agree that redundant HA systems are usually not required. In the past it was expensive to get. However, tooling is now so good that with reasonable developers and reasonable infrastructure design, you can get it very, very cheaply if your services are packaged reasonably (CD-capable) with basically sane architecture and your infrastructure is halfway modern. This truly is excellent, because gone are the 1990s of everyone-relies-on-grizzled-sysadmin-and-two-overpriced-boxes-with-failover. I don't think CI is a plaster, it is a great way to work, but like any tool or workflow is not appropriate in all situations. We do over-complicate. Methodologies are too meta: programmers are already operating at max concurrent levels of abstraction. Better to incrementally adjust workflow (CI/CD on the workflow for the CI/CD of the workflow!). That's not to say that there's no value to some people thinking at this level some of the time, but Yoda told me "desk with agile literature much, sign of untidy mind be". I think he was right.