Service-Based Architecture Designer

When to Use

You need to design a service-based architecture or evaluate whether service-based is the right distributed style for a system. Service-based architecture is a hybrid of microservices — it uses coarse-grained domain services (typically 4-12, averaging ~7) rather than fine-grained single-purpose services. It is considered the most pragmatic distributed architecture style. Typical situations:

• New distributed system — "we need something beyond a monolith but microservices feels like overkill"
• Monolith decomposition — "our deployments take hours and we want independent deployability"
• Architecture comparison — "should we use service-based or microservices?"
• Database topology — "should our services share a database or have separate ones?"
• Transaction design — "we need ACID transactions across some of these workflows"

Before starting, verify:

• Has an architecture style already been selected? If the user hasn't decided on service-based yet, consider using architecture-style-selector first.
• Are driving architecture characteristics known? If not, use architecture-characteristics-identifier — you need to know what quality attributes drive the design.
• If the user explicitly asks for service-based design, proceed directly.

Context & Input Gathering