Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design

> One kind of coupling that people tend to overlook as they transition to a microservices architecture is database coupling, where all services talk to the same database and updating a service means changing the schema. You need to split the database up and denormalize it.

That sounds pretty heavy duty; the kind of thing you might do once your company is already big. I wouldn't want to start out that way though, it sounds like a recipe for a mess.