Yeah so that’s one place I sort of sacrifice microservice purity. If you have a transaction that needs to update multiple domains then you need a non-microservice to handle that IMO. All of these rules are really good rules of thumb, but there will always be complexity that doesn’t fit into our perfect little boxes.

The important thing is to document the hell out of the exceptions and do everything you can to keep them on the periphery of business logic. Fight like hell to minimize dependencies on them.

But that’s true of any architecture.

If it’s not clear I pretty much agree with everything you say here.