Right, I agree with this. I think "monolith" in my example was a standin for "non-microservice". I am all for dividing services after technical requirements; a

Right, I agree with this. I think "monolith" in my example was a standin for "non-microservice". I am all for dividing services after technical requirements; and certainly any non-O(1) memory requirements for instance one may want to look at a dedicated service. When we get into the things you say, the definition of "service" gets more important too. Is it separate DB, or only separate k8s pod or VM, or what... If the only constraint is to make computation efficient and robust, the solution space is bigger if one does not add the "should fullfill the microservices ideology" as another constraint. With microservices on k8s I think it is pretty common for each VM to have many open connections to 15+ databases though, so not sure if I got that particular point.