# 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

5. Choose a Target Consolidated Service
   * Example: Merge DeviceService, GeoLocationService, RuleEngineService into FraudDetectionService.
6. 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
7. Plan Data Migration (if needed)
   * If services used separate DBs, decide on a unified schema or integration layer
   * Preserve audit trails and logs
8. Evaluate Risks
   * Breakage in integration APIs?
   * Load and performance impact?
   * Regression testing needs?\


🚀 Phase 3: Implementation

9. 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
10. Deploy in Parallel (Strangler Pattern)

* Route a portion of traffic to the new consolidated service
* Monitor performance, logs, errors
* Gradually phase out old services

11. Remove Deprecated Services

* Once stable, decommission legacy services
* Remove their pipelines, infra, configs



📘 Phase 4: Governance & Documentation

12. Update Ownership Maps and API Docs
13. 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.
