# Microservices

Microservice architecture patterns, API design, service communication, and distributed system operations

## Articles

- [Saga Pattern: Choreography, Orchestration, and Compensating Transactions](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/saga-pattern/) — Deep dive into the saga pattern for distributed transactions across microservices. Covers choreography vs orchestration, compensating transactions, saga execution coordinators, failure handling, idempotency, and workflow engines like Temporal and Cadence.
- [CQRS and Event Sourcing](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/cqrs-event-sourcing/) — Separating read and write models with CQRS, event sourcing for audit and replay, event store design, projections, snapshots, eventual consistency handling, and when these patterns are overkill. Practical examples with Kafka and EventStoreDB.
- [Contract Testing for Microservices](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/contract-testing/) — Consumer-driven contract testing with Pact, provider verification, Pact Broker, schema compatibility testing with Avro and Protobuf, API contract testing vs integration testing, CI integration, and when to use contract tests vs end-to-end tests.
- [Schema Evolution and Compatibility](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/schema-evolution/) — Schema evolution rules for Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema. Covers backwards, forwards, and full compatibility, schema registries (Confluent, Apicurio), breaking change detection, migration strategies, and API versioning for schema changes.
- [Distributed Data Consistency Patterns](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/distributed-data-consistency/) — Practical patterns for data consistency in microservices: CAP theorem implications, eventual consistency, outbox pattern, change data capture with Debezium, two-phase commit limitations, conflict resolution, and read-your-writes consistency.
- [Service Decomposition Anti-Patterns](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/service-decomposition-anti-patterns/) — Common microservice decomposition mistakes: distributed monolith, nano-services, shared database coupling, synchronous dependency chains, entity services, premature decomposition, and when to merge services back together.
- [API Gateway Patterns: Selection, Configuration, and Routing](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/api-gateway-patterns/) — Decision framework for choosing and configuring API gateways including Kong, Emissary-Ingress, NGINX, Traefik, AWS API Gateway, and Cloudflare API Shield with rate limiting, auth offloading, and request transformation patterns.
- [API Versioning Strategies](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/api-versioning-strategies/) — Decision framework for API versioning approaches including URL path, header, query parameter, and content negotiation. Covers breaking changes, deprecation workflows, and sunset policies.
- [Circuit Breaker and Resilience Patterns](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/circuit-breaker-resilience/) — Reference for circuit breaker states, bulkhead isolation, retry with exponential backoff, and timeout management. Covers implementation with Istio, Envoy, and application-level libraries.
- [Event-Driven Architecture for Microservices](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/event-driven-architecture/) — Decision framework for event-driven patterns including event sourcing, CQRS, saga and outbox patterns, message broker selection between Kafka, RabbitMQ, and NATS, and tradeoffs between synchronous and asynchronous communication.
- [gRPC for Service-to-Service Communication](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/grpc-service-communication/) — Reference for implementing gRPC in microservices including protobuf definitions, streaming patterns, load balancing, health checking, deadline propagation, and error handling with practical examples.
- [Message Queue Selection and Patterns](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/message-queue-patterns/) — Decision framework for choosing between RabbitMQ, Kafka, NATS, and Redis Streams. Covers delivery guarantees, ordering, scaling patterns, and when to use each system.
- [Monolith to Microservices: When and How to Decompose](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/monolith-to-microservices/) — Decision framework for evaluating monolith vs microservices, decomposition strategies including strangler fig and domain-driven design, database splitting approaches, and communication overhead tradeoffs.
- [Rate Limiting Implementation Patterns](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/rate-limiting-patterns/) — Reference for rate limiting algorithms and implementation patterns. Covers token bucket, sliding window, and fixed window algorithms, Redis-based distributed rate limiting, API gateway rate limiting, application-level rate limiting, RateLimit headers, and graceful degradation strategies.
- [Service-to-Service Authentication and Authorization](https://agent-zone.ai/knowledge/microservices/service-mesh-auth/) — Reference for mTLS with Istio and Linkerd, SPIFFE/SPIRE workload identity, authorization policies, JWT validation at the mesh level, and zero-trust service communication.


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