architecture-review

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name: Architecture Review description: Analyze system architecture and suggest improvements for scalability and maintainability.

Architecture Review Skill

Evaluate system design and recommend changes to improve scalability, maintainability, and resilience.

Microservices Patterns

• Bounded contexts: Ensure each service owns a clear domain. Avoid shared databases; prefer APIs or events for cross-service communication.
• API gateway: Centralize auth, rate limiting, and routing. Keep services behind the gateway.
• Event-driven: Use message queues or event buses for async, decoupled communication. Design for eventual consistency where appropriate.
• Service discovery: Support dynamic registration and discovery for deployment flexibility.
• Circuit breaker: Isolate failing dependencies to prevent cascading failures.

Coupling Analysis

• Afferent coupling: Count incoming dependencies. High afferent = stable core; changes have wide impact.
• Efferent coupling: Count outgoing dependencies. High efferent = fragile; depends on many external modules.
• Instability: I = Ce / (Ca + Ce). Prefer stable cores (low I) and flexible peripheries (high I).
• Identify cyclic dependencies and recommend breaking cycles via interfaces or new modules.

Dependency Graphs

• Build a dependency graph of modules, packages, or services. Use tools (e.g., madge, jdeps, cargo-deps) or static analysis.
• Identify critical paths, bottlenecks, and single points of failure.
• Recommend layering (e.g., presentation → application → domain → infrastructure) and enforce dependency direction.

Scalability Considerations

• Horizontal scaling: Stateless services, shared-nothing design, idempotent operations.
• Data partitioning: Sharding, partitioning by tenant or region. Avoid hot spots.
• Caching: Edge, application, and data-layer caching. Define invalidation strategies.
• Async processing: Offload heavy work to queues. Use backpressure and rate limiting.

Output

Provide a structured review: current state summary, identified issues with severity, recommended changes with rationale, and a prioritized action plan. Include diagrams where they clarify the analysis.