service-architecture

# Service Architecture Service architecture is the discipline of decomposing a large system into cooperating services with explicit contracts, operational boundaries, and failure isolation. The goal is not to have as many services as possible — it is to minimize the coupling between parts of the system that change at different rates or have different operational requirements, while keeping the total operational and cognitive cost manageable. This skill catalogs the patterns, trade-offs, and anti-patterns that come up every time a team crosses the boundary from monolith to service-oriented, or from service-oriented to mesh. **Agent affinity:** vogels (service-oriented architecture at Amazon scale), dean (internal Google service patterns), hamilton-cloud (economics of operating services at scale) **Concept IDs:** cloud-multi-service-coordination, cloud-heat-stack-templates, cloud-runbook-structure ## The Core Principle: Coupling vs Cohesion A well-designed service has high internal cohesion (things inside the service change together) and low external coupling (things outside the service change independently). The unit of service decomposition is not the noun from the domain model — it is the change rate and the failure domain. Two nouns that always change together belong in the same service even if they feel conceptually distinct. Two fields of the same noun may belong in different services if they are owned by different teams and have different availability requirements. ...