Microservices Patterns

Patterns for building distributed systems: service decomposition, inter-service communication, data management, and resilience. Helps you avoid the "distributed monolith" anti-pattern.

What's Inside

• Decision Framework — when to use microservices vs monolith
• Service Decomposition — by business capability, Strangler Fig migration pattern
• Communication Patterns — synchronous (REST/gRPC) with retries, asynchronous (events/Kafka)
• Data Patterns — database per service, Saga pattern for distributed transactions
• Resilience Patterns — circuit breaker, retry with exponential backoff, bulkhead isolation
• API Gateway Pattern — single entry point, request aggregation, circuit breaking
• Health Checks — liveness and readiness probes

When to Use

• Decomposing a monolith into microservices
• Designing service boundaries and contracts
• Implementing inter-service communication
• Managing distributed transactions
• Building resilient distributed systems

Installation

npx add https://github.com/wpank/ai/tree/main/skills/backend/microservices-patterns

Manual Installation

Cursor (per-project)

From your project root:

mkdir -p .cursor/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/backend/microservices-patterns .cursor/skills/microservices-patterns

Cursor (global)

mkdir -p ~/.cursor/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/backend/microservices-patterns ~/.cursor/skills/microservices-patterns

Claude Code (per-project)

From your project root:

mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/backend/microservices-patterns .claude/skills/microservices-patterns

Claude Code (global)

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r ~/.ai-skills/skills/backend/microservices-patterns ~/.claude/skills/microservices-patterns

Related Skills

• architecture-patterns — Clean Architecture, Hexagonal, and DDD foundations
• event-store — Event sourcing for microservices data management
• architecture-decision-records — Document decomposition and design decisions

Part of the Backend skill category.