Agent Academy

Agent Academy is a free, source-linked library of skills, prompts, MCP servers and bot templates, organised into courses by profession, for people who hand real work to AI agents: 1,467 live resources, each with its original link, license and safety tags.

Skill

microservices-patterns

Design microservices architectures with service boundaries, event-driven communication, and resilience patterns. Use when building distributed systems, decomposing monoliths, or implementing microservices.

No credentialsDoes not send
Open the original

https://github.com/wshobson/agents/blob/main/plugins/backend-development/skills/microservices-patterns/SKILL.md

Install
npx skills add wshobson/agents --skill microservices-patterns

Original content

Full originalMITSource

Republished in full under its license, with attribution. The source is authoritative.

name: microservices-patterns
description: Design microservices architectures with service boundaries, event-driven communication, and resilience patterns. Use when building distributed systems, decomposing monoliths, or implementing microservices.

Microservices Patterns

Master microservices architecture patterns including service boundaries, inter-service communication, data management, and resilience patterns for building distributed systems.

When to Use This Skill

  • Decomposing monoliths into microservices
  • Designing service boundaries and contracts
  • Implementing inter-service communication
  • Managing distributed data and transactions
  • Building resilient distributed systems
  • Implementing service discovery and load balancing
  • Designing event-driven architectures

Core Concepts

1. Service Decomposition Strategies

By Business Capability

  • Organize services around business functions
  • Each service owns its domain
  • Example: OrderService, PaymentService, InventoryService

By Subdomain (DDD)

  • Core domain, supporting subdomains
  • Bounded contexts map to services
  • Clear ownership and responsibility

Strangler Fig Pattern

  • Gradually extract from monolith
  • New functionality as microservices
  • Proxy routes to old/new systems

2. Communication Patterns

Synchronous (Request/Response)

  • REST APIs
  • gRPC
  • GraphQL

Asynchronous (Events/Messages)

  • Event streaming (Kafka)
  • Message queues (RabbitMQ, SQS)
  • Pub/Sub patterns

3. Data Management

Database Per Service

  • Each service owns its data
  • No shared databases
  • Loose coupling

Saga Pattern

  • Distributed transactions
  • Compensating actions
  • Eventual consistency

4. Resilience Patterns

Circuit Breaker

  • Fail fast on repeated errors
  • Prevent cascade failures

Retry with Backoff

  • Transient fault handling
  • Exponential backoff

Bulkhead

  • Isolate resources
  • Limit impact of failures

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

Related

SkillSoftware engineering

claude-api

Reference for the Claude API / Anthropic SDK — model ids, pricing, params, streaming, tool use, MCP, agents, caching, token counting, model migration. TRIGGER — read BEFORE opening the target file; don't skip because it "looks like a one-liner" — whenever: the prompt names Claude/Anthropic in any form (Claude, Anthropic, Fable, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, `anthropic`, `@anthropic-ai`, `claude-*`, `us.anthropic.*`,…

Sourcegithub.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/claude-api/SKILL.md

No credentialsDoes not sendApache-2.0
SkillSoftware engineering

doc-coauthoring

Guide users through a structured workflow for co-authoring documentation. Use when user wants to write documentation, proposals, technical specs, decision docs, or similar structured content. This workflow helps users efficiently transfer context, refine content through iteration, and verify the doc works for readers. Trigger when user mentions writing docs, creating proposals, drafting specs, or similar…

Sourcegithub.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/doc-coauthoring/SKILL.md

No credentialsDoes not sendnot stated
SkillSoftware engineering

mcp-builder

Guide for creating high-quality MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that enable LLMs to interact with external services through well-designed tools. Use when building MCP servers to integrate external APIs or services, whether in Python (FastMCP) or Node/TypeScript (MCP SDK).

Sourcegithub.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/mcp-builder/SKILL.md

No credentialsDoes not sendApache-2.0
SkillSoftware engineering

skill-creator

Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when users want to create a skill from scratch, edit, or optimize an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or optimize a skill's description for better triggering accuracy.

Sourcegithub.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/skill-creator/SKILL.md

No credentialsDoes not sendApache-2.0
SkillSoftware engineering

webapp-testing

Toolkit for interacting with and testing local web applications using Playwright. Supports verifying frontend functionality, debugging UI behavior, capturing browser screenshots, and viewing browser logs.

Sourcegithub.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/webapp-testing/SKILL.md

No credentialsDoes not sendApache-2.0
SkillSoftware engineering

ai-debt-detector

Use after generating code, after accepting AI suggestions, or when reviewing AI-written modules. Also use when code works but feels brittle, when error handling seems thin, when orphaned resources or missing cleanup are suspected, or when the agent claims done but hidden debt may exist. Catches the specific failure patterns AI agents produce that humans would not.

Sourcegithub.com/wshobson/agents/blob/main/plugins/skill-forge-essentials/skills/ai-debt-detector/SKILL.md

No credentialsDoes not sendMIT