Developer intentionally built a 6-service microservices backend for a zero-user shop to learn distributed systems

A solo developer building Stallora, a multi-vendor commerce platform, deliberately chose a microservices architecture over a simpler monolith despite having no users yet. The project, worked on about ten hours a week, splits the backend into an API gateway and five services to create real-world distributed system conditions. The developer ranked learning how distributed systems run in production as the top priority, above monetisation, and documented this reasoning as a formal decision record. The architecture forces hands-on experience with hard problems like partial failures, duplicate message delivery, and the transactional outbox pattern — challenges that are invisible inside a monolith. The entire stack, including six JVMs, a message broker, database, cache, and tracing, is also designed to run on a budget VPS within roughly 4 GB of memory for future buyers.