/microservices-patterns

name: microservices-patterns
description: Design microservices architectures with service boundaries, event-driven communication, and resilience patterns. Use when building distributed systems, decomposing monoliths, or implementing microservices.

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.