Why microservices for a blog? Analyzing an architectural decision

Where did the idea come from?

When I started building my portfolio, I faced a classic choice: a Laravel monorepo that works from day one, or something more ambitious. I chose the latter — and I have mixed feelings about it, but in a positive sense.

The goal was not "the best architecture for a blog." The goal was to create a platform that serves as a living demo of my skills. The blog is just a pretext.

What does the system consist of?

The system is made up of 6 services:

Frontend — Laravel + Blade, serves pages to users
Blog — Laravel API, manages posts, comments, categories, tags
Users — Laravel API, manages users, RBAC
SSO — OAuth2 server based on Laravel Passport
Admin — admin panel based on FilamentPHP
Analytics — collects post views and aggregates statistics

Each service has its own MySQL database, its own container, its own tests.

Communication between services

Services communicate in two ways:

HTTP (synchronous)

Frontend calls the Blog API and Users API directly over Docker's internal network. I use X-Internal-Api-Key as a simple authorization mechanism between services.

RabbitMQ (asynchronous)

When a user views a post, Frontend publishes a post.viewed event to RabbitMQ. The Analytics consumer picks it up and writes it to the database. When a user updates their data in Users, a user.updated event is sent to Blog, which updates its local copy of the author.

Frontend ──HTTP──▶ Blog API
Frontend ──HTTP──▶ Users API
Frontend ──RabbitMQ──▶ Analytics
Users ──RabbitMQ──▶ Blog (author synchronization)

Was it a good idea?

Pros:

Each service can be deployed independently
Natural separation of responsibilities
Great material for learning Kubernetes, ArgoCD, CI/CD
A demo you can show at a job interview

Cons:

A lot of boilerplate upfront (the same scaffolding 6 times over)
Debugging over the network is harder than in a monolith
Infrastructure overhead (RabbitMQ, Traefik, separate databases)

If I were building a "real" product from scratch, I would probably choose a monolith. But this is not a "real" product — it is a platform for learning and demonstration. And as such, it does its job remarkably well.