When to Use
- Decompose a monolith or greenfield system into bounded contexts and service boundaries
- Design REST, gRPC, or event contracts between services with clear ownership
- Choose sync vs async communication and document failure semantics
- Implement resilience—timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, bulkheads, load shedding
- Enforce database-per-service (or schema-per-service) and avoid shared mutable stores
- Apply saga, outbox, or idempotent consumers for cross-service consistency
- Containerize services with twelve-factor config, health checks, and graceful shutdown
- Add observability—correlation/trace IDs, RED metrics, structured logs, trace propagation
- Plan API versioning, deprecation, and backward compatibility at gateway or mesh edge
- Introduce contract tests or consumer-driven contract checks between teams
When NOT to Use
- Operate Kubernetes clusters, Helm platform add-ons, or cluster SRE only →
platform-engineer,cluster-deployment-engineer - Define org-wide SLO programs, error budgets, and PRR gates →
site-reliability-engineer - Design enterprise iPaaS, canonical enterprise models, or B2B integration hubs →
enterprise-integration-api-developer - Build monolith features, general RFCs, or stack-agnostic code review without service split →
senior-software-engineer - Implement CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, or release automation only →
devops - Provision VPC, managed cloud services, or landing zones →
cloud-engineer,infrastructure-engineer - Gate production builds and artifact promotion policy →
build-validator - Profile p99 latency and run load/soak tests as the main task →
performance-engineer - Classified air-gapped pipelines, ATO evidence, cleared promotion →
classified-software-devsecops-engineer
Related skills
| Need | Skill |
|---|---|
| General service design, RFCs, refactoring | senior-software-engineer |
| Internal developer platform, golden paths | platform-engineer |
| SLOs, error budgets, reliability program | site-reliability-engineer |
| Enterprise integration, OpenAPI hub, iPaaS | enterprise-integration-api-developer |
| CI/CD, GitOps, deploy pipelines | devops |
| Cloud networking, IAM, managed services | cloud-engineer |
| Terraform modules and core IaC | infrastructure-engineer |
| Build gates and promotion validation | build-validator |
| Profiling, load tests, latency budgets | performance-engineer |
| Cross-system ADRs and NFR sign-off | senior-system-architecture |
| Rollout cutover and change tiers | deployment-strategist |
| Pipeline SAST, SBOM, supply chain | devsecops |
Core Workflows
1. Scope and boundaries
Map domains, define service APIs, and document non-goals.
See references/microservices_developer_scope.md and references/service_boundaries_and_design.md.
2. Communication and contracts
Pick sync/async patterns; define schemas, errors, and versioning.
See references/communication_sync_async.md.
3. Resilience and reliability
Apply timeouts, retries, breakers, and failure isolation per dependency.
See references/resilience_and_reliability.md.
4. Data, events, and consistency
Own data per service; use outbox/saga where cross-service invariants matter.
See references/data_consistency_and_events.md.
5. Operate, test, and ship
Observability, contract tests, twelve-factor deploy, gateway compatibility.
See references/observability_testing_deployment.md.
Outputs
- Service map — contexts, APIs, data ownership, sync/async edges
- Contract draft — OpenAPI/proto/event schema with error model and versioning note
- Resilience table — per-dependency timeout, retry, breaker, fallback
- Consistency note — saga/outbox/idempotency choice with failure compensation
- Runbook snippet — health checks, dashboards, rollback triggers
Principles
- Prefer fewer, cohesive services over fine-grained chatter; split on change cadence and team boundaries
- Fail fast with explicit timeouts; never unbounded blocking across the network
- Design for partial failure—degrade features, do not cascade outages
- Make contracts testable before production coupling multiplies