Cloud Solution Architect

tl;dr: the Azure Architecture Center in skill form. SKILL.md is a long procedural document (10 design principles → 6 architecture styles → 44 patterns tagged with WAF pillars → technology choice trees → 10 performance antipatterns → mission-critical design → 7-step review workflow). It does not generate an architecture from a prompt alone; it walks a human-provided requirements list through a structured decision flow and refuses to skip the WAF pillar tradeoffs.

What it actually does

The SKILL.md fetched on 2026-09-10 from microsoft/skills/main/.github/skills/cloud-solution-architect/SKILL.md is one of the 11 Core skills in the Microsoft skills bundle. The body covers, in order:

Ten design principles for Azure applications

Self-healing, redundancy, minimize coordination, scale out, partition around limits, design for operations, managed services, identity service, design for evolution, build for business needs. Each principle ships concrete tactics (retry with backoff + jitter, bulkhead isolation, async messaging, managed identity, zero-trust, ADR-backed evolution).

Six architecture styles

N-tier, Web-Queue-Worker, Microservices, Event-driven, Big data, Big compute. The selection table maps domain complexity → style, team autonomy → style, data volume → style, latency → style. Key Azure services are listed per style.

44 cloud design patterns

Grouped into messaging, reliability, data management, design & structure, security & access, deployment & scaling. Every pattern is tagged against the five WAF pillars: Reliability, Security, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency. Reference files in ./references/ (design-patterns.md, technology-choices.md, best-practices.md, mission-critical.md) carry the implementation details — the skill explicitly defers detail work there.

Technology choices

Decision framework (requirements → constraints → tradeoffs → select) for compute, storage, data stores, messaging, networking, AI services, containers. The bias is documented: prefer PaaS over IaaS.

Performance antipatterns

10 named antipatterns with fix recipes: Busy Database, Busy Front End, Chatty I/O, Extraneous Fetching, Improper Instantiation, Monolithic Persistence, No Caching, Noisy Neighbor, Retry Storm, Synchronous I/O.

Mission-critical design

For 99.99%+ SLO workloads: multi-region active-active, zone redundancy, async replication, conflict resolution, chaos engineering, automated rollback, composite health scores, SLI dashboards, runbooks + game days.

Well-Architected Framework pillars

Five-pillar review with tradeoff matrix (e.g. redundancy → cost, isolation → latency, consolidation → reliability blast radius, caching → stale-data risk). Every decision must be documented across all five pillars.

Architecture review workflow

Seven steps: identify requirements → select architecture style → choose tech stack → apply design patterns → address cross-cutting concerns (identity, observability, security, CI/CD) → validate against WAF pillars → document decisions as ADRs.

Install

microsoft/skills is a plugin bundle, not a single-skill npm package. The wizard picks skills; the README documents the manual path:

# Wizard — install the bundle, then choose from the picker
npx skills add microsoft/skills

# Manual — clone the repo, copy the single skill folder
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/skills
cp -r microsoft/skills/.github/skills/cloud-solution-architect \
  your-project/.github/skills/

# Multi-host: symlink so .claude/skills/ and .opencode/skills/ see it too
ln -s ../.github/skills .claude/skills
ln -s ../.github/skills .opencode/skills

Targets GitHub Copilot CLI / VS Code Copilot out of the box (the README’s directory is .github/skills/). For Claude Code, also symlink .claude/skills/ so the host picks it up; same for .opencode/skills/ if your opencode install watches that path.

What it explicitly is not

• Not a one-shot architecture generator. Inputs must include real requirements (availability target, latency p95, throughput, RTO/RPO, data residency, cost ceiling). The skill will push back if the human skipped step 1.
• Not transport-agnostic. Patterns are Azure-centric (Service Bus, Event Grid, Cosmos DB, AKS, Front Door). The procedural structure is reusable; the service names are not.
• Not a code-writing skill. It produces ADR markdown, decision matrices, and tradeoff tables — not Terraform or Bicep. Pair with azure-mgmt-* skills if you want IaC.
• sandbox_test untested — we read the package, we did not run an architecture review in the sandbox.

Gotchas

• Pick one skill at a time. The README is explicit: “Loading all skills causes context rot: diluted attention, wasted tokens, conflated patterns.” cloud-solution-architect is broad enough on its own.
• Reference files are referenced, not bundled inline. SKILL.md points to ./references/design-patterns.md, ./references/technology-choices.md, ./references/best-practices.md, ./references/mission-critical.md. If the host can’t reach the cloned repo path, the detail work stops at the tables in SKILL.md itself.
• WAF pillars are not optional. The skill refuses to mark a review “done” until all five pillars are checked and tradeoffs are documented. If you wanted a quick yes/no, this is the wrong skill.
• The skill is in active development. The README says “Work in Progress — this repository is under active development.” Test coverage for cloud-solution-architect is not listed in the per-language test summary (it sits in Core). Expect upstream edits.
• License is MIT for the repo, but check the skill folder if upstream adds a per-skill LICENSE in a future commit.

Related: MCP Builder (Anthropic) (different vendor, similar procedural depth for MCP server work), Frontend Design Review (microsoft/skills) (same Microsoft bundle, design-system instead of cloud), Skill Creator (microsoft/skills) (when you need to author a procedure like this one).