microservices-patterns

SKILL.md

Microservices Patterns

Master microservices architecture patterns including service boundaries, inter-service communication, data management, and resilience patterns for building distributed systems.

When to Use This Skill

Decomposing monoliths into microservices

Designing service boundaries and contracts

Implementing inter-service communication

Managing distributed data and transactions

Building resilient distributed systems

Implementing service discovery and load balancing

Designing event-driven architectures

Core Concepts

1. Service Decomposition Strategies

By Business Capability

Organize services around business functions

Each service owns its domain

Example: OrderService, PaymentService, InventoryService

By Subdomain (DDD)

Core domain, supporting subdomains

Bounded contexts map to services

Clear ownership and responsibility

Strangler Fig Pattern

Gradually extract from monolith

New functionality as microservices

Proxy routes to old/new systems

2. Communication Patterns

Synchronous (Request/Response)

REST APIs

gRPC

GraphQL

Asynchronous (Events/Messages)

Event streaming (Kafka)

Message queues (RabbitMQ, SQS)

Pub/Sub patterns

3. Data Management

Database Per Service

Each service owns its data

No shared databases

Loose coupling

Saga Pattern

Distributed transactions

Compensating actions

Eventual consistency

4. Resilience Patterns

Circuit Breaker

Fail fast on repeated errors

Prevent cascade failures

Retry with Backoff

Transient fault handling

Exponential backoff

Bulkhead

Isolate resources

Limit impact of failures

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.