I have a bad habit of throwing myself into analysis paralysis over issues that I shouldn't be thinking so hard about.

I also tend to hop on bandwagons and then get lost in the technobabble.

To be clear, this post is not so much seeking to give advice, but to ask:

Is it okay if my app is not microservices-based? At least, at the start?

Do you recommend any articles I can read about the topic and when to split the app into microservices?

I am developing an application that is highly ambitious -- it aims to teach languages, but also to be a social platform for those learning the languages. In its future, it aims to be a dating platform and also offer e-commerce services.

For now, we just want to get off the ground.

I decided to go with Spring Boot and with that I also decided that to go with microservices from the ground up.

Now, in development, I have to run 6 apps just to test a few routes and it's quickly becoming unmaintainable and I'm certain there are people on the verge of imploding with Cringe(TM) as they read that.

I'm coming to the understanding that for an app to be properly split into microservices, each microservice actually needs to be able to run on its own and stand alone. If for example one goes down, that would not affect the entire application as a whole.

In my case, if one goes down, the entire thing goes belly up. So really, what I'm doing is running a complex monolith...with separate code-bases. Would you agree?

I'm generally just looking for some guidance here. I'm seriously considering going with a single Spring Boot (monolith) project to seriously simplify the project, my life, my productivity, and my stress levels.

Is that okay?