As an entrepreneur, my definition of “speed” is “the amount of time and money it takes to reach an objective”. Code execution speed sometimes matters, because I want happy users. But once the app is fast enough, being faster doesn’t help much. Fast means “fast enough to get the job done”.
Going directly to a microservices architecture is risky, so consider building a monolithic system first. Split to microservices when, and if, you need it.
This world of programming is held together by code. Millions and millions of lines of code. Nobody knows how much there is. Some of it is more than 30 years old, some less than a week, and chances are you used parts of both yesterday.
Most people aren’t doing true CI/CD. Most teams wait far too long to get their code into prod after writing it. Most painful of all are the teams who have done all the hard parts — wired up continuous integration, achieved test coverage, etc — but still deploy by hand, thus depriving themselves of the payoff for their hard work.