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Microservices Architecture

Microservices is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each owning its domain and data. Each service runs in its own process and communicates through lightweight mechanisms like HTTP/gRPC or async messaging. The style enables teams to develop, deploy, and scale services independently, reducing coupling and increasing resilience. It trades the simplicity of a monolith for the operational complexity of distributed systems - that trade-off must be made deliberately.

When to Use This Skill

Trigger on these scenarios:

• Decomposing a monolith into services (strangler fig, domain extraction)
• Designing inter-service communication (sync vs async, REST vs gRPC vs events)
• Implementing distributed transaction patterns (saga, two-phase commit alternatives)
• Applying CQRS or event sourcing to a service or domain
• Designing an API gateway layer (routing, auth, rate limiting, aggregation)
• Setting up a service mesh (Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect)
• Implementing resilience patterns (circuit breaker, bulkhead, retry, timeout)
• Defining service boundaries using Domain-Driven Design (bounded contexts)