nickcrew/claude-cortex
Overview
This skill provides practical guidance for designing, implementing, and operating event-driven architectures using event sourcing, CQRS, sagas, and message-driven communication. It focuses on patterns and operational practices that enable scalable, loosely coupled, and eventually consistent distributed systems. Use it when you need auditability, high throughput, or resilient cross-service workflows.
How this skill works
The skill helps you identify domain events, design immutable event schemas with versioning and correlation IDs, and choose patterns (event sourcing, CQRS, choreography/orchestration, sagas) that match your requirements. It recommends infrastructure choices (Kafka, RabbitMQ, managed cloud services), outlines implementation details like append-only event stores, idempotent handlers, and read-model projections, and covers operation needs such as monitoring, replay, and schema management.
When to use it
- Designing asynchronous, decoupled microservices or distributed systems
- Implementing event sourcing for audit trails and temporal queries
- Applying CQRS to scale read models independently from writes
- Coordinating distributed transactions using sagas or compensations
- Building real-time event streams, data pipelines, or pub/sub systems
Best practices
- Model events as immutable, past-tense facts with correlation and causation IDs
- Design idempotent handlers and assume at-least-once delivery
- Version event schemas and support multiple versions during migration
- Partition by aggregate ID for scalability and keep event stores append-only
- Implement monitoring for event lag, processing errors, and throughput
- Provide replay capability and a schema registry for safe evolution
Example use cases
- E-commerce orders: OrderCreated events, payment sagas, and read-models for customer portals
- Financial ledgers: Event sourcing for auditability and temporal balance queries
- Inventory systems: CQRS read stores for fast queries and event streams for updates
- Cross-service workflows: Saga coordination for multi-step business processes
- Analytics pipelines: Kafka-based event streams feeding real-time dashboards
FAQ
Choose event sourcing when you need a complete audit trail, temporal queries (state at time T), multiple projections, or replay for recovery. For simple CRUD needs, event sourcing adds complexity and may be unnecessary.
How do I handle schema changes in events?
Use versioned event schemas, a schema registry, and backward/forward compatibility strategies. Support multiple schema versions during migration and provide transformers for older events when rebuilding projections.
4 skills
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