Thinking is scary. No one (among non-thinking colleagues) is going to criticize you for using de-facto standard services like kafka, mongo, redis, ecc... regardless of the nonsensical architecture you come up with.

Yes, I also put Redis in that list. You can cache and serve data structure in many other ways, for example replicate the individual features you need in you application instead of going the lazy route and another service to the mix. And don't get me started on Kafka... money thrown in the drain when a stupid grpc/whatever service would do.

Part of being an engineer is also selecting the minimum amount of components for your architecture and not being afraid of implementing something on your own if you only need 1 of 100s features that an existing product require.

> No one (among non-thinking colleagues) is going to criticize you for using de-facto standard services

Well put!