Design and Build Great Web APIs

Shutting Down an Existing API

As you create more and more APIs and deploy updates for the ones you have in production, eventually you’ll run into the need to shut down one or more of them. The process of “turning off” your API means addressing several important issues in order to ensure data integrity and operational safety, including these:

• Communicating the API shutdown
• Placing code in the public domain
• Publishing the interface design as open source
• Making consumer data recoverable
• Marking your API 410 GONE

Let’s briefly look at each one of these issues.

Communicating the API Shutdown

Before you shut things down, you need to make sure you’ve notified all the API consumers you can. For internal APIs, this is often done through company-wide email ...