One wrinkle I liked was to build a monolith, distributing the same bits everywhere, and to configure the actual services to start on an instance-by-instance bas

One wrinkle I liked was to build a monolith, distributing the same bits everywhere, and to configure the actual services to start on an instance-by-instance basis. This simplifies distribution (e.g., "unpack this single zip file, it's got everything") and you can rapidly change what is running and where with a command-and-control system of your choice. I can't imagine having different build products and deployment stories for every service type, nor can I imagine institutionalized version skew of more than a couple of weeks. This probably doesn't scale to large teams, but it let a small team work pretty effectively with thousands of microservices.