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> This sounds a good idea in theory, but not sure about in real world. > Consider having 4 versions of API, will you create 3 levels of proxies or each time re

> This sounds a good idea in theory, but not sure about in real world. > Consider having 4 versions of API, will you create 3 levels of proxies or each time re-write your old proxy? In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, pretty soon you won't have any paying customers any more, and you'll be free to make incompatible changes as often as you want.

chipdart 2y ago
> In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, (...) You do not break anyone's experience by releasing a new version that's voluntarily adopted by your paying customers. You are also somehow inexplicably assuming that your paying customers didn't ended up being paying customers because you adapted to customer demands and added the value that was important enough to them that they decided to pay for it. I can tell you for a fact that there are paying customers for APIs that pay to use both the latest API and older versions. More often than not, they still consume old versions because they cannot spare the manpower to update some clients/services. On top of that,the problem grows a few orders of magnitude when you open your APIs to the public. Even when you control the only clients to your APIs, it's impossible to get some end users to upgrade their software. Some still run old OSes that have long been unsupported, and some are even physically unable to run updates.
tuyguntn 2y ago
> In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, pretty soon you won't have any paying customers any more Business 101, your profit is in higher margin or lowering your spending/cost. If your business is stable and making money your customers feel safe and are happy. Deprecation lowers your cost (system complexity, less maintenance, dev time -> new features, new revenue streams). If you have an almost infinite resources then of course why not, you can support all possible API versions (there are few companies who can afford it and doing it at scale, AWS and Win32 APIs)

chipdart 2y ago

> In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, (...) You do not break anyone's experience by releasing a new version that's voluntarily adopted by your paying customers. You are also somehow inexplicably assuming that your paying customers didn't ended up being paying customers because you adapted to customer demands and added the value that was important enough to them that they decided to pay for it. I can tell you for a fact that there are paying customers for APIs that pay to use both the latest API and older versions. More often than not, they still consume old versions because they cannot spare the manpower to update some clients/services. On top of that,the problem grows a few orders of magnitude when you open your APIs to the public. Even when you control the only clients to your APIs, it's impossible to get some end users to upgrade their software. Some still run old OSes that have long been unsupported, and some are even physically unable to run updates.

tuyguntn 2y ago

> In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, pretty soon you won't have any paying customers any more Business 101, your profit is in higher margin or lowering your spending/cost. If your business is stable and making money your customers feel safe and are happy. Deprecation lowers your cost (system complexity, less maintenance, dev time -> new features, new revenue streams). If you have an almost infinite resources then of course why not, you can support all possible API versions (there are few companies who can afford it and doing it at scale, AWS and Win32 APIs)