CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-s3amazon-ec2aws-lambdaamazon-sagemaker
Sudarshan Kannan
Sudarshan Kannan

Reputation: 19

How does AWS inform API users of changes?

I'm working on a project centered around API Change Management. I'm curious as to how AWS informs developers of changes to its APIs. Is it through the document history (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/history.html)? Or do they send out emails to developers?

Regarding emails, are emails sent to all developers using the API (ex. API Gateway) or just developers using a particular endpoint and will be affected by the change? What is the frequency of notifications - breaking changes, minor changes, etc.

Thanks so much for your help!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1313

Answers (1)

stefansundin
stefansundin

Reputation: 3044

For non-breaking changes, you can learn about them on the Developer Guide as you pointed out. Some of these changes are also announced on their What's New page (RSS feed). You can also follow the SDK releases which are updated often (e.g. by using the RSS feed for aws-sdk-go releases). I believe that most of the SDKs are using code generation to generate a lot of the API functionality. They push updates to these files in the SDK git repositories (ruby example, go example), but it is not clear if there is another place to find these files. It doesn't seem like they want us to consume these directly (see this developer forum thread from 2015). There's also awsapichanges.info, which appears to be built by AWS themselves.

AWS very rarely makes breaking changes to their API. Even SimpleDB, which is a very old AWS product, still works.

Having said that, they do make breaking changes from time to time, but they try to announce them well ahead of time. The biggest breaking change that they are trying to complete is probably their attempt to deprecate S3 path-style access. This was first quietly announced in their AWS Developer Forums, which caused a lot panic especially since the timeline was incredibly short. Based on the panic, AWS quickly backtracked and revised the plan, more publicly this time.

They have done some other S3 breaking changes in other ways. For example, S3 buckets must now have DNS-compliant names. This was only recently (March 1, 2018) enforced on new buckets in us-east-1, but for most other regions this was enforced from the start when the regions were made available. Old S3 buckets in us-east-1 may still have names that are not DNS-compliant.

Lambda is removing old runtimes once the version of the programming language stops being maintained (such as Python 2.7). This should be a known expectation for anyone who starts using the service, and there is always a new version that you can migrate to. AWS sends you email reminders if you still have Lambda functions that is using the old runtime, when the deadline nears.

Here is a GitHub repository where people try to track breaking changes: https://github.com/SummitRoute/aws_breaking_changes. You can see that the list is not that long.

Upvotes: 4

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