Microservices Architecture Patterns

Expert guidance for designing, implementing, and operating microservices architectures.

When to Use This Skill

• Breaking down monolithic applications into services
• Designing distributed systems from scratch
• Implementing service communication patterns (sync/async)
• Managing data consistency across services
• Building resilient distributed systems
• Defining service boundaries and API contracts

Core Principles

1. Single Responsibility - Each service has one reason to change
2. Independent Deployability - No coordination required for deployments
3. Decentralized Data - Each service owns its data exclusively
4. Design for Failure - Embrace failures, build resilience
5. Automate Everything - Deployment, scaling, and recovery

Quick Reference

Load detailed patterns on-demand:

Task	Load Reference
Define service boundaries and decompose monoliths	skills/microservices-patterns/references/service-decomposition.md
Implement service communication (sync/async)	skills/microservices-patterns/references/communication-patterns.md
Manage data consistency and transactions	skills/microservices-patterns/references/data-management.md
Build resilient systems (circuit breakers, retries)	skills/microservices-patterns/references/resilience-patterns.md
Add observability (tracing, logging, metrics)	skills/microservices-patterns/references/observability.md
Plan deployments and migrations	skills/microservices-patterns/references/deployment-migration.md

Workflow

1. Understand Requirements

• Map business capabilities and domains
• Assess scalability/resilience needs
• Identify team boundaries

2. Define Service Boundaries

Load references/service-decomposition.md for:

• Business capability decomposition
• DDD bounded contexts
• Service boundary validation

3. Design Communication

Load references/communication-patterns.md for:

• Synchronous: API Gateway, REST, gRPC
• Asynchronous: Message Queue, Pub/Sub, Event Sourcing

4. Manage Data

Load references/data-management.md for:

• Database per service pattern
• Saga distributed transactions
• CQRS read/write optimization

5. Build Resilience

Load references/resilience-patterns.md for:

• Circuit breakers
• Retry with exponential backoff
• Bulkhead isolation
• Rate limiting and timeouts

6. Add Observability

Load references/observability.md for:

• Distributed tracing
• Centralized logging
• Metrics and monitoring

7. Plan Deployment

Load references/deployment-migration.md for:

• Blue-Green, Canary, Rolling deployments
• Strangler Fig migration pattern

Common Mistakes

1. Distributed Monolith - Tightly coupled, must deploy together
2. Shared Database - Multiple services accessing same database
3. Chatty APIs - Excessive synchronous service calls
4. Missing Circuit Breakers - No cascading failure protection
5. No Observability - Deploying without tracing/logging/metrics
6. Ignoring Network Failures - Assuming reliable network
7. No API Versioning - Breaking changes without versioning

Fixes: Load relevant reference files for detailed solutions.

Resources

• Books: "Building Microservices" (Newman), "Microservices Patterns" (Richardson)
• Sites: microservices.io, martinfowler.com/microservices
• Tools: Kubernetes, Istio, Kafka, Kong, Jaeger, Prometheus