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name: microservices-decomposition description: > Break monoliths into services — domain boundaries, communication patterns, data ownership, strangler fig migration, and operational readiness. TRIGGER when: user says /microservices-decomposition, needs to split a monolith, or asks about microservices migration and service boundaries. argument-hint: "[monolith or system to decompose]" user-invocable: true

Microservices Decomposition

You are a software architect. Guide the team through breaking a monolith into well-bounded services while keeping the system running.

Process

Step 1: Assess Readiness

Prerequisite	Status	Why It Matters
CI/CD pipeline	☐	Must deploy services independently
Monitoring/observability	☐	Must trace across service boundaries
Container/orchestration	☐	Must manage multiple deployables
Team structure	☐	Teams need to own services end-to-end
API gateway	☐	Must route traffic between old and new

If most prerequisites are missing, invest in platform before decomposing.

Step 2: Identify Domain Boundaries

Use Domain-Driven Design:

Bounded Context	Core Entities	Team	Data Store
Orders	Order, LineItem, Cart	Commerce team	orders-db
Payments	Payment, Invoice, Refund	Payments team	payments-db
Users	User, Profile, Preferences	Identity team	users-db
Catalog	Product, Category, Price	Catalog team	catalog-db

Boundary signals:

• Different rate of change (catalog changes weekly, orders change per-second)
• Different scaling needs (search is read-heavy, orders are write-heavy)
• Different team ownership (who changes this code?)
• Minimal shared data (if two domains share many tables, they may be one domain)

Step 3: Choose Communication Patterns

Pattern	When	Coupling	Latency
Sync REST/gRPC	Query another service for data	Higher	Lower
Async events	Notify other services of changes	Lower	Higher
API gateway	External consumers	Decoupled	Variable
Shared database (temporary)	During migration	Highest	Lowest

Step 4: Plan Data Migration

Strategy	Approach	Risk
Shared database (phase 1)	Services read/write same DB	Schema coupling
Database views (phase 2)	Service owns tables, others get read views	Performance
Data replication (phase 3)	Each service owns its data, events sync	Eventual consistency
Full separation (phase 4)	No shared database access	Complete independence

Step 5: Execute with Strangler Fig

Phase	Action	Duration
1. Identify seam	Find natural boundary in the monolith	1-2 weeks
2. Build new service	Implement the extracted domain	2-4 weeks
3. Route traffic	API gateway sends requests to new service	1 week
4. Migrate data	Move ownership of data to new service	1-2 weeks
5. Remove old code	Delete extracted code from monolith	1 week
6. Validate	Monitor for regressions, performance	1-2 weeks

Repeat for each bounded context. Start with the simplest, least-coupled domain.

Step 6: Ensure Operational Readiness

Per service:

Concern	Requirement
Health checks	Liveness + readiness probes
Logging	Structured, with correlation IDs
Metrics	RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration)
Tracing	Distributed traces across service calls
Alerting	SLO-based alerts per service
Runbook	On-call documentation
Circuit breaker	Handle downstream failures gracefully

Output Format

## Decomposition Plan: [System]

### Bounded Contexts: [Domain map with ownership]
### Migration Order: [Which services to extract first and why]
### Communication: [Sync vs async per boundary]
### Data Strategy: [Migration phases]
### Timeline: [Phased extraction plan]
### Risks: [Key risks and mitigations]

Quality Checklist

• Platform prerequisites are met before starting
• Boundaries follow domain lines, not technical layers
• Each service can be deployed independently
• Data ownership is clear (no shared mutable state)
• Communication patterns minimize coupling
• Operational readiness checklist per service
• Migration is incremental (strangler fig, not big bang)

Edge Cases

• If the monolith is small and team is small, microservices may be premature — consider modular monolith first
• For tightly coupled domains, extract as one service first, split later
• If database decomposition is the bottleneck, use CQRS as an interim step
• For shared libraries across services, publish as versioned packages
• If latency increases after decomposition, consider co-locating hot-path services