I ' d go with one metal hook and an eyepatch ! If I had one arm . And ever went to a gym . <| sep |> A monolith is a single service that does a lot of things that are not necessarily related to one another . You can certainly write a monolith in Express , but you ' ll eventually run into the same scaling issues you ' re likely seeing with Django . In your case , streaming and CRUD operations are very obviously different tasks . I would breaking down your monolith by business domains . Need to manage users ? Write an service for it . Need a speedy readwrite service for messaging ? That ' s another service . Express or my preferred alternative , Koa are great at quickly writing small services like this , so timedifficulty costs are pretty low . Don ' t count on isomorphic JS being a huge timesaver , but you might gain productivity by not having to context switch between languages . All that said , most of your headaches with many services are going to come from the DevOps side of things . I don ' t know the scaling needs of your project , but once you have multiple instances of multiple services running , you ' ll need service discovery . Docker Swarm mode in Docker 1 . 12 makes this pretty easy , and there are many Kubernetes guides out there , but it all requires learning some Ops . Go is cool , but I ' m in the same boat as you , having only experimented a bit . JSNode is my love .