microservices-design

microservices-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from vignesh2027/AI-AGENT-SKILLS. It costs 16 tokens per session (520 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design guide for microservices, which are separately deployable applications that communicate over networks. It focuses on deciding whether a split is justified and defining service boundaries, contracts, and failure handling.

In plain words
What is it for?
Choosing service boundaries, defining and versioning communication contracts, planning independent deployments, handling failures, and ensuring services can be observed.
Why use it?
Splitting a single application into services adds distributed-systems complexity, so this helps avoid unnecessary splits and makes justified ones safer to operate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Choosing service boundaries, defining and versioning communication contracts, planning independent deployments, handling failures, and ensuring services can be observed.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vignesh2027/ai-agent-skills/microservices-design
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 vignesh2027/AI-AGENT-SKILLS --skill microservices-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vignesh2027/AI-AGENT-SKILLS

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 microservices-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vignesh2027/ai-agent-skills/microservices-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vignesh2027/ai-agent-skills/microservices-design)
Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for microservices-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vignesh2027/ai-agent-skills/microservices-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vignesh2027/ai-agent-skills/microservices-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 520 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 $0.00016 $0.00520
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00260
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00104
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00052

Measured 10d ago against content hash 09f1689bcf5e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

microservices-design 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 10d 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-design/SKILL.md · 56 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 56 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Microservices solve a people problem (independent team deployments) while creating a technical problem (distributed systems complexity). This skill only adds microservices when they solve a real problem, and designs them to be independently deployable, failure-isolated, and observable.

When to Use

  • Before splitting a monolith into services
  • When designing a new service in an existing distributed system
  • When services are tightly coupled in ways that prevent independent deployment

Process

Step 1: Justify the split

A service split is justified when: teams are blocked on each other's deployments, scaling requirements differ dramatically, or technology requirements differ. Don't split for "separation of concerns" alone — a module achieves that at lower cost.

Step 2: Define service boundaries by business capability

Services should own a business capability end-to-end. Don't split by technical layer (don't make a "user data service" that stores data for 10 other services).

Step 3: Design the interface contract

Services communicate via explicit contracts. Define the contract before implementation. Version it from day one.

Step 4: Choose communication style

  • Sync (HTTP/gRPC): Use when caller needs the result immediately
  • Async (messaging): Use when caller does not need immediate result; decouples availability

Async is better for resilience; sync is simpler to reason about. Choose based on the requirement.

Step 5: Design for failure isolation

Service A must not fail because Service B is slow or unavailable:

  • Timeouts on all outbound calls
  • Circuit breakers for repeated failures
  • Fallback responses or graceful degradation
  • Bulkhead pattern: don't let one failing downstream exhaust connection pools

Step 6: Distributed data

Each service owns its data store. No shared databases. Services that need data from another service: use the API, or replicate via events. Cross-service joins are a design smell.

Step 7: Distributed tracing

All services propagate trace IDs. You must be able to trace a request across all services it touches.

Read the full file on GitHub · 56 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. 10d ago First seen · 56 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A 09f1689bcf5e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

microservices-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository vignesh2027/AI-AGENT-SKILLS (2 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 520 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-31.