Thanks for sharing your perspective!
You reference AWS services and Jenkins jobs making things smoother. Is there anything, in particular, you would say should be considered a pre-requisite before adopting microservices, based on what you've learned?
by AWS services I meant things like cloudformation, packer, ansible, consul, the nitty-gritty of ELB, EC2, S3, docker, hardest part for me was IAM and vpc/subnets, dealing with multiple caches instead of a big one, also distributed sessions(in the end we got rid of sessions and used identifiers and a key-value store).
Jenkins jobs to deploy and test every single service on its own, and for deploying everything to a test environment and run integration tests.
UAT for testing all services on test environment.
There is much more than that but these are the things I remember from the top of my head.