microservices

A guide to microservices, an approach where an application is split into smaller services that communicate over a network and own separate parts of the work or data.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to split a monolithic application, choose REST, gRPC, or messaging, add retries and circuit breakers, manage cross-service transactions, or design an API gateway.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unclear service boundaries, cascading failures, and inconsistent data when a system is distributed across multiple services.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kid-sid/codex-spellbook/microservices
Any agent
npx skills add kid-sid/codex-spellbook --skill microservices
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kid-sid/codex-spellbook

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,201 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00041 $0.03201
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01600
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00640
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00320

Measured 2d ago against content hash 95de2b13aa2f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

microservices 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 2d ago.

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/microservices/SKILL.md · 387 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 387 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Microservices Patterns

Design and implementation patterns for decomposing monoliths and building reliable distributed backend systems.

When to Activate

  • Decomposing a monolith into services or defining service boundaries
  • Choosing between synchronous (REST/gRPC) and asynchronous (messaging) communication
  • Implementing resilience patterns: circuit breaker, retry, bulkhead, timeout
  • Designing data ownership and cross-service transactions (Saga, CQRS)
  • Setting up an API gateway or BFF for client-facing traffic
  • Designing for eventual consistency or event-driven workflows
  • Debugging distributed failures, cascading errors, or data inconsistency

Service Decomposition

Decomposition Strategies

Strategy Approach Best For
By domain (DDD) Align services to bounded contexts Greenfield, domain-rich systems
By subdomain Core / supporting / generic subdomains Prioritising build-vs-buy
Strangler fig Incrementally replace monolith routes Existing monoliths
By volatility Isolate frequently-changing logic High-churn business rules

Bounded Context Rules

# BAD: Shared User model across services
OrderService   → reads User.loyaltyPoints
PaymentService → reads User.billingAddress
EmailService   → reads User.email

# GOOD: Each service owns what it needs
OrderService   → owns OrderCustomer { id, name, loyaltyPoints }
PaymentService → owns PaymentProfile { userId, billingAddress, paymentMethods }
EmailService   → owns ContactRecord { userId, email, preferences }

Each service owns its data. No direct cross-service DB queries.

Strangler Fig Migration

1. Route all traffic through a facade (nginx / API gateway)
2. Identify one vertical slice (e.g., /api/payments/*)
3. Implement that slice as a new service
4. Re-route the facade to the new service
5. Delete the monolith code for that slice
6. Repeat — monolith shrinks, services grow

Inter-Service Communication

Sync vs Async Decision

Read the full file on GitHub · 387 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. 2d ago First seen · 387 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 95de2b13aa2f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

microservices is a skill published in the GitHub repository kid-sid/codex-spellbook (21 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 3,201 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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