As I talked about in my new book, I'm skeptical of starting systems with a microservice architecture. Splitting a new system across a bunch of different services presumes you'll know how to organize things up front, and lots of little microservices can make refactoring difficult. 

 

So I start with a small monolith. As I build, I add tests. My tests run very fast...hundreds of tests per second. I run the tests automatically on every change to the code, so speed is essential. 

 

When the entire test suite for the monolith starts creeping up into the 800-900ms range, I start to notice the time it takes to run the tests, and then I know it's time for this monolith to split into two smaller services. By then, I usually know enough about the system to know how to split it cleanly, and because I have a good test suite, refactoring it into this shape is easy. 

 

It usually doesn't split in half...80/20 is more common, but it's enough to speed my tests up again. After that, I just keep growing the services and splitting as necessary. The last system I built like this wound up with dozens of services, each with dozens or hundreds of tests which never take more than a second to run. Right in the Goldilocks Zone, if you ask me.