arch-microservices

One-line summary

Decompose the system into independently deployable services, each owning its data and aligned with a business capability. Communicate over the network. Pay the operational tax in exchange for autonomy and independent scaling.

When to use this skill

• Multiple teams stepping on each other in a single codebase / deployment.
• Different parts of the system need independent scaling characteristics (one is CPU-bound, another I/O-bound, a third bursty).
• Different parts have different release cadences and one team's deploy must not block another's.
• Different parts have different reliability profiles (a critical payment path; a non-critical analytics dashboard).

When NOT to use this skill

• One team, one product, no scaling pressure — you don't have the problems microservices solve. Keep the monolith.
• Domain not understood well enough to draw service boundaries — premature splits are very expensive to reverse.
• No operational maturity (no CI/CD, no observability, no on-call) — microservices amplify operational pain.
• Resume-driven development. Stop.

Core content

Service boundaries follow business capabilities, not technical layers. A customer-service, orders-service, pricing-service is correct. A database-service, api-service, cache-service is anti-pattern. Boundaries are typically aligned with DDD bounded contexts (see ddd-bounded-context).

Each service owns its data. No shared database. If service B needs data from service A, B either calls A's API or A publishes events that B subscribes to. Sharing a database underneath two "microservices" makes them a distributed monolith — the worst of both worlds.

Communication patterns.

• Synchronous (REST, gRPC). Direct, easy to reason about, latency-coupled. Use for query-heavy patterns where the caller needs an immediate answer.
• Asynchronous (events, see arch-event-driven). Decoupled in time, eventually consistent. Use for workflows that span services.

Most production systems mix both.

Edge patterns.

• API gateway — single entry point for external clients; handles auth, rate-limiting, routing, response composition. Decouples clients from internal service topology.
• Backend for Frontend (BFF) — a gateway tailored per client type (mobile, web, partner API). Avoids the "one gateway must satisfy every client" trap.
• Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) — sidecar proxies handling traffic, mTLS, retries, observability. Moves cross-cutting infrastructure out of services. Justified at scale; overkill below ~10 services.

Anti-pattern alert: distributed monolith. Services deployed independently but coupled tightly (shared database, synchronous chains, lock-step releases). Carries all the operational cost of microservices with none of the autonomy benefit. Hardest to escape.

Decision heuristics

• Default to monolith. Microservices solve specific problems (team autonomy, independent scaling, fault isolation). If you don't have those problems, you don't need this style.
• Service boundaries align with bounded contexts. Use ddd-bounded-context first; let the contexts inform the splits, not the other way around.
• A service that owns no data of its own is a smell — usually it's an adapter or a coordinator that should live elsewhere.
• Synchronous chains of more than 2-3 services for a single user request indicate broken decomposition. Reach for events or rethink the boundary.
• BFF when client types diverge significantly; gateway with content negotiation when they don't.

Anti-patterns

• Distributed monolith. Services that must release together. Worst of both worlds.
• Nanoservices. Services so small they ship per-class. Coordination cost exceeds any decomposition benefit.
• Shared database. Two services reading and writing the same tables — they're not separate.
• Synchronous chains. Service A calls B calls C calls D for one user request. Each adds latency and failure surface; the chain fails when any link does.
• Choosing microservices because Netflix does — Netflix solved Netflix's problems; your problems are different.

See also

• ddd-bounded-context — service boundaries should follow bounded contexts.
• arch-event-driven — the standard async communication style.
• arch-saga — coordinating distributed transactions.
• arch-circuit-breaker — failure isolation between services.
• arch-strangler-fig — migrating from monolith to microservices.

References

• Richards & Ford, Fundamentals of Software Architecture, Ch. 17 (Microservices).
• Sam Newman, Building Microservices (O'Reilly).
• Sam Newman, Monolith to Microservices (O'Reilly).
• Khononov, Learning DDD, Ch. 14 (Microservices).