I've found the nuance is in the middle somewhere. We've all seen the madness with web scale infrastructure for a personal blog, but one gigantic compilation uni

I've found the nuance is in the middle somewhere. We've all seen the madness with web scale infrastructure for a personal blog, but one gigantic compilation unit will eventually bite you in the ass too (i.e. rebuilds get very slow). What you probably want is something where everything lives in the same repository, but as separate modules/dlls which can be included in some common execution framework the team previously agreed upon. If you have something approximating microservices-as-dlls, then you are essentially eating cake while having cake when you really think about it. Function calls are still direct (sometimes even inlined), but you could quickly take that same DLL and wrap it with a web server and put it on its own box if needed. Establishing clear compilation unit boundaries without involving network calls is the best path for us, and I suspect it's the best path for anyone to start with. We take this "don't involve the network" philosophy into our persistence layer too. SQLite is much easier to manage compared to the alternatives.