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Ask HN: How do you notify API consumers of changes?

6 points by CaptainJustin ↗ HN
I was wondering how SaaS apps / enterprises notify consumers of your APIs of breaking changes / deprecation?

Is sending an email to the registered user account enough? Have some found that to be painful for consuming the exposed functionality?

Perhaps there is a convention for this sort of thing?

12 comments

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debacle
Version your API if you want enterprise customers.
IE6
While I agree with your sentiment I also acknowledge that implementing something properly and having enterprise customers is often unrelated.
ezekg
You should be versioning your API where possible, but I understand that's not always feasible e.g. when your API is not your main product. Regardless, I've always gotten email reminders about deprecations and upgrade paths. If you have customers using the API for business-critical things, you should absolutely version your API.
cimmanom
I just got bitten by a vendor that changed a business critical API twice in three weeks with neither versioning nor notification. It's very unprofessional.

I strongly second the recommendation to version customer-facing APIs. You should never be releasing backwards-incompatible changes without giving customers the option to upgrade on their own timelines (within reason - its unreasonable to expect you to support an older API for a decade; 3 months is an absolute minimum, though, and I'd recommend more like 18-36 months for enterprise customers; and there can be exceptions for changes that address severe security or data loss defects.)

And yes, at the very least, email communication is appreciated. Even if you're versioning - if you have a customer using an outdated API, you should be warning them that it's deprecated and then again a couple times leading up to EOL.

is_true
WTF? Is it something critical?
cimmanom
A hosted build system. It didn't bring our customer-facing business to a halt or anything, but it did grind our QA and deployment process to a standstill at a particularly inconvenient time.
bellt0wn98121
Do you pay this vendor? I'm trying to wrap my head around how a paid vendor is so careless.
cimmanom
Yup, we pay them.

Support has since informed us that the announcement was in the monthly newsletters we don't read because they're usually all marketing materials.

iamNumber4
Agreed, to add to this convention; having the version of the api as part of the communication protocol or message format is also recommended. This is so you can still support older api versions on the host side until a known cut off date. This allows for a soft roll out or smooth transition to the new version. There are various ways to implement, http header, http path, structured file formats to include a version variable, or meta tags, etc...

This also allows you to put hooks in to track users of the old api version so that additional reach out/communication to the slow adopters can be had.

rajacombinator
I don’t manage an API, but as a consumer of APIs that others manage, I can tell you that SOP seems to be “push breaking changes with no warning and often times no documentation.” (Even from very large companies you would assume know better.) If you send any kind of warning or advance notice you are likely in the top quartile already.
ecesena
If you can, you should version your api, and if you didn’t yet you can start v2 with your new breaking changes.

I’d reach out via email to your users to migrate to the new version, and you can track how many are still using the old one. Timeline to move may vary, but I’d say that 3-6mo is relatively common.

masudrhossain
When you sign up to use their api, you give them your email. They email blast those peoples.