Act as a Principal Software Architect. Design a microservices architecture for a global e-commerce platform expecting 100,000 concurrent users. Your design must include: 1. Service decomposition strategy (including bounded contexts). 2. API Gateway patterns and rate limiting. 3. Inter-service communication protocols (synchronous vs asynchronous). 4. Data consistency patterns handling eventual consistency across orders and inventory. 5. A strategy for handling cascading failures and circuit breakers. Provide a detailed written explanation and a text-based diagram representing the data flow.