I think the burden is really on the software engineer here, any change that goes out needs to be forwards and backwards compatible. A good pattern ive seen for

I think the burden is really on the software engineer here, any change that goes out needs to be forwards and backwards compatible. A good pattern ive seen for this is having 2 stages to your test environment, a single host and then the rest of the fleet. First you deploy to the single host. Then you run "compatibility" tests that essentially write to the new code, and read from the old code and vice versa. Thats the ideal way, but also a lot of work. A simpler way it just to roll out changes very slowly, and hopefully detect a deployment with compatibility issues before it effects too many customers.