A practical step-by-step plan to consolidate microservice

Here’s a practical step-by-step plan to consolidate microservices in a structured and low-risk way:

🔧 Phase 1: Discovery & Assessment

1. Inventory Your Microservices

   • List each service with its responsibilities, endpoints, data ownership, tech stack, deployment pipeline, team ownership.

2. Analyze Interactions

   • Identify services that are tightly coupled, always deployed together, or frequently call each other.

   • Use tracing tools (e.g. Jaeger, Zipkin, Kiali) or call graphs from logs.

3. Identify Candidates for Consolidation

   • Group services that:

     • Belong to the same bounded context

     • Share a database or data model

     • Require tight coordination

     • Have low independent scalability needs

4. Define Business Capabilities

   • Map services to business capabilities (e.g., “User Account”, “Fraud Detection”, “Notification”, etc.)

✅ Phase 2: Planning the Consolidation

1. Choose a Target Consolidated Service

   • Example: Merge DeviceService, GeoLocationService, RuleEngineService into FraudDetectionService.

2. Define New Internal Architecture

   • Maintain modularity with internal packages or components (e.g., fraud/device/, fraud/rules/, fraud/geo/)

   • Define unified API surface

   • Keep clean domain boundaries inside the service

3. Plan Data Migration (if needed)

   • If services used separate DBs, decide on a unified schema or integration layer

   • Preserve audit trails and logs

4. Evaluate Risks

   • Breakage in integration APIs?

   • Load and performance impact?

   • Regression testing needs?

🚀 Phase 3: Implementation

1. Build and Test Internally

   • Merge business logic and data models into the new consolidated service

   • Write integration and regression tests

   • Reuse BDD-style tests where possible

2. Deploy in Parallel (Strangler Pattern)

• Route a portion of traffic to the new consolidated service

• Monitor performance, logs, errors

• Gradually phase out old services

1. Remove Deprecated Services

• Once stable, decommission legacy services

• Remove their pipelines, infra, configs

📘 Phase 4: Governance & Documentation

1. Update Ownership Maps and API Docs

2. Monitor Post-Consolidation KPIs

• Deployment frequency, latency, support tickets, incident count

📌 Bonus Tip: Use Feature Flags

If consolidation affects live user flows, use feature flags to toggle between legacy and new logic for safe rollout.