In a distributed system with a microservice architecture having a plurality of services and a messaging layer for communication therebetween, systems and methods include receiving messages from a first service to a second service in the messaging layer; queuing responses from the messages; and utilizing one or more bulk messaging techniques to send the responses back to the first service from the second service. The systems and methods can also include maintaining statistics related to the one or more bulk messaging techniques; and automatically determining which of the one or more bulk messaging techniques based on the statistics, to minimize latency of the messaging layer.