Design and Build Great Web APIs

The Process for Safely Deploying APIs

When you get to the point where you plan to release your API updates, you have one more opportunity to check for backward-compatibility issues and confirm that you’ve done all you can to eliminate “breakage” for your API consumer clients. That means you need to figure out the best way to deploy your updates into production. To cover all these details, we’ll need to focus on a number of things:

• Supporting reversibility
• Using side-by-side deployments
• Automatically routing traffic vs. waiting for clients
• Overwriting old API releases

That’s a lot of things to account for, so let’s dig in.

Supporting Reversibility

Ironically, the first thing that you need to do when implementing your API update deployment system ...