Software Architecture Design — Quick Reference

Use this skill for system-level design decisions rather than implementation details within a single service or component.

Quick Reference

Task	Pattern/Tool	Key Resources	When to Use
Choose architecture style	Layered, Microservices, Event-driven, Serverless	modern-patterns.md	Greenfield projects, major refactors
Design for scale	Load balancing, Caching, Sharding, Read replicas	scalability-reliability-guide.md	High-traffic systems, performance goals
Ensure resilience	Circuit breakers, Retries, Bulkheads, Graceful degradation	scalability-reliability-guide.md	Distributed systems, external dependencies
Document decisions	Architecture Decision Record (ADR)	adr-template.md	Major technical decisions, tradeoff analysis
Define service boundaries	Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Bounded contexts	microservices-template.md	Microservices decomposition
Model data consistency	ACID vs BASE, Event sourcing, CQRS, Saga patterns	data-architecture-patterns.md	Multi-service transactions
Plan observability	SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, Distributed tracing, Metrics, Logs	architecture-blueprint.md	Production readiness
Migrate from monolith	Strangler fig, Database decomposition, Shadow traffic	migration-modernization-guide.md	Legacy modernization
Design inter-service comms	API Gateway, Service mesh, BFF pattern	api-gateway-service-mesh.md	Microservices networking