This still looks like a micro service architecture to me, or very close. A monolith solution would probably be everything in a single process (1 tier). Queues d

This still looks like a micro service architecture to me, or very close. A monolith solution would probably be everything in a single process (1 tier). Queues decouple services, whether the code base includes the consumer & producer together or are separate doesn't matter, they are still deployed separately. It's definitely not black/white, but a spectrum.