Software Architecture: The Great Consolidation
The Business Goal
Byte Burger wants to reduce incident load and release friction without losing the boundaries that protect important business capabilities.
The Story
The team does not demolish the whole city. It brings related stations back into one well-marked kitchen, retires duplicate event hops, and keeps the few independently valuable services separate. Each move has a rollback plan and a measure of success.
The Decision
Consolidate deliberately: map callers and data ownership, preserve contracts during migration, reconcile state, remove unused infrastructure, and keep modular boundaries inside the resulting application.
Decision Record
| Field | Decision |
|---|---|
| Valid while | Consolidation reduces cost and coordination without violating needed isolation |
| Operational tax | Migration risk, data reconciliation, compatibility, and decommissioning work |
| Invalidation trigger | Consolidation begins to violate an isolation, scale, or recovery boundary that the business can measure |
| Reversal path | If consolidation violates a measured isolation, scale, or recovery boundary, restore the independent boundary through the preserved compatibility layer and migration checkpoint before retiring the old path |
The Last Bite
De-architecture is not retreat. It is choosing the smallest system that still tells the truth about the business.
Next chapter: Software Architecture: What We Would Build Today
After adding and removing complexity, Byte Burger can finally answer the honest retrospective question: which decisions would it make first if it began again with current evidence?