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.

microservices-patterns