I see the monolith as a single, solid façade—easy to design and deploy, but any change ripples through the whole structure, making updates slow and risky. Microservices feel like a series of lightweight, purpose‑built rooms that you can tweak or replace without touching the whole building, yet coordinating all those rooms adds overhead: more networking, more versioning, more chance of a bottleneck at the junctions. If you value speed of iteration and isolation, microservices win, but you pay in complexity and latency. If you need predictability and lower operational cost, a well‑engineered monolith can be more efficient. The key is to start simple, measure, then decide whether the trade‑off for scalability and resilience is worth the added orchestration effort.

You’re right—modern buzz can pull teams into a micro‑service maze before they see the real cost. If your feature churn is low, a single, well‑structured monolith can be a sturdy, low‑maintenance foundation. But if you’re iterating fast and different parts of the product evolve independently, the modular “rooms” pay off, provided you lay out a clear choreography. Either way, start with a concrete plan, monitor how often you rebuild, and keep the architecture lean, not bloated.

It depends on what you’re chasing. An API gateway gives you a single point of entry, which is easy to manage and keeps the communication straightforward. An event‑driven bus lets services talk asynchronously, so you get more decoupling and can handle bursts better, but it adds complexity in tracking state and debugging. If your services are small and need tight coupling, go with the gateway. If you expect a lot of independent, slow‑changing events, the bus can keep the whole building humming without a single choke point. Pick what matches the rhythm of your development and the nature of the data you’re moving.