Microservices Architect

Purpose

Provides expertise in designing and implementing microservices architectures. Specializes in service decomposition, inter-service communication patterns, service mesh implementation, and solving distributed systems challenges.

When to Use

• Decomposing monoliths into microservices
• Defining service boundaries and APIs
• Implementing service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
• Designing API gateway patterns
• Handling distributed transactions (Saga pattern)
• Implementing event-driven communication
• Setting up service discovery and load balancing
• Designing for resilience (circuit breakers, retries)

Quick Start

Invoke this skill when:

• Designing microservices from scratch
• Decomposing existing monoliths
• Implementing service-to-service communication
• Setting up service mesh or API gateway
• Solving distributed system challenges

Do NOT invoke when:

• Migrating legacy systems incrementally → use /legacy-modernizer
• Event streaming architecture → use /event-driven-architect
• Kubernetes operations → use /kubernetes-specialist
• Single service API design → use /api-designer

Decision Framework

Communication Pattern?
├── Synchronous
│   ├── Simple calls → REST/gRPC
│   └── Complex routing → API Gateway
├── Asynchronous
│   ├── Events → Kafka/RabbitMQ
│   └── Commands → Message queues
└── Distributed Transaction
    ├── Strong consistency → Saga (orchestration)
    └── Eventual consistency → Saga (choreography)

Core Workflows

1. Service Decomposition

1. Identify bounded contexts from domain model
2. Define service responsibilities (single purpose)
3. Design APIs for each service
4. Determine data ownership per service
5. Plan inter-service communication
6. Define deployment strategy

2. Service Mesh Implementation

1. Select mesh (Istio, Linkerd, Consul)
2. Deploy sidecar proxies
3. Configure traffic management
4. Implement mTLS for security
5. Set up observability (tracing, metrics)
6. Define retry and circuit breaker policies

3. Saga Pattern Implementation

1. Identify distributed transaction boundaries
2. Choose orchestration vs choreography
3. Define compensating transactions
4. Implement saga coordinator (if orchestrated)
5. Handle failure scenarios
6. Add monitoring for saga status

Best Practices

• Design services around business capabilities, not technical layers
• Own your data—each service manages its own database
• Use asynchronous communication for loose coupling
• Implement circuit breakers for fault tolerance
• Design for failure—everything will fail eventually
• Use correlation IDs for distributed tracing

Anti-Patterns

Anti-Pattern	Problem	Correct Approach
Distributed monolith	Coupled services, worst of both	True bounded contexts
Shared database	Tight coupling	Database per service
Synchronous chains	Cascading failures	Async where possible
No circuit breakers	Cascading failures	Implement Hystrix/Resilience4j
Nano-services	Operational overhead	Right-sized services