designing-distributed-systems

designing-distributed-systems is a skill for Claude Code from ancoleman/ai-design-components. It costs 99 tokens per session (3,857 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing systems whose parts run across multiple computers or services, often called distributed systems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when planning microservices, multi-region systems, distributed transactions, replication, partitioning, or fault-tolerant infrastructure.
Why use it?
It explains trade-offs around network failures, data consistency, scaling, replication, and reliable communication between services.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the infrastructure-skills plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when planning microservices, multi-region systems, distributed transactions, replication, partitioning, or fault-tolerant infrastructure.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ancoleman/ai-design-components/designing-distributed-systems
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ancoleman/ai-design-components --skill designing-distributed-systems
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ancoleman/ai-design-components

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install infrastructure-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for designing-distributed-systems

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ancoleman/ai-design-components/designing-distributed-systems.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ancoleman/ai-design-components/designing-distributed-systems)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ancoleman/ai-design-components/designing-distributed-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ancoleman/ai-design-components/designing-distributed-systems.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 99 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,857 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00099 $0.03857
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.01929
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00771
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00386

Measured 8d ago against content hash 6eb17cc70157, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

designing-distributed-systems scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (examples/circuit-breaker/circuit_breaker.py, examples/consistent-hashing/consistent_hash.py, examples/cqrs/cqrs_example.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/designing-distributed-systems/SKILL.md · 478 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 478 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Designing Distributed Systems

Design scalable, reliable, and fault-tolerant distributed systems using proven patterns and consistency models.

Purpose

Distributed systems are the foundation of modern cloud-native applications. Understanding fundamental trade-offs (CAP theorem, PACELC), consistency models, replication patterns, and resilience strategies is essential for building systems that scale globally while maintaining correctness and availability.

When to Use This Skill

Apply when:

  • Designing microservices architectures with multiple services
  • Building systems that must scale across multiple datacenters or regions
  • Choosing between consistency vs availability during network partitions
  • Selecting replication strategies (single-leader, multi-leader, leaderless)
  • Implementing distributed transactions (saga pattern, event sourcing, CQRS)
  • Designing partition-tolerant systems with proper consistency guarantees
  • Building resilient services with circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries
  • Implementing service discovery and inter-service communication

Core Concepts

CAP Theorem Fundamentals

CAP Theorem: In a distributed system experiencing a network partition, choose between Consistency (C) or Availability (A). Partition tolerance (P) is mandatory.

Network partitions WILL occur → Always design for P

During partition:
├─ CP (Consistency + Partition Tolerance)
│  Use when: Financial transactions, inventory, seat booking
│  Trade-off: System unavailable during partition
│  Examples: HBase, MongoDB (default), etcd
│
└─ AP (Availability + Partition Tolerance)
   Use when: Social media, caching, analytics, shopping carts
   Trade-off: Stale reads possible, conflicts need resolution
   Examples: Cassandra, DynamoDB, Riak

PACELC: Extends CAP to consider normal operations (no partition).

  • If Partition: Choose Availability (A) or Consistency (C)
  • Else (normal): Choose Latency (L) or Consistency (C)

Consistency Models Spectrum

Read the full file on GitHub · 478 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 478 lines · 99 tokens per session scan A 6eb17cc70157

Subscribe to this mod's changes

designing-distributed-systems is a skill published in the GitHub repository ancoleman/ai-design-components (519 stars, last pushed 9mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 99 tokens to every session and 3,857 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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