Migrate External API

Migrate an external API

Same shape every time, on five clients now. Written down after the third one, where I improvised and shipped a cutover I could not roll back.

The rule that produces every step below

Every phase ships alone and reverts alone. If a phase cannot be reverted by a deploy, it is two phases.

Steps

1. Read the provider's changelog end to end. Not the migration guide — the changelog. The guide tells you what they want you to change; the changelog tells you what actually changed.
2. List the semantic differences, not the signature differences. Retries, idempotency, pagination, error taxonomy, rate limits. Signature changes are found by the type checker; semantic changes are found in production.
3. New client alongside the old, unused. Ships on its own, reverts on its own.
4. Reads first. A wrong read is visible. A wrong write is not.
5. A disagreement metric before the write cutover. Count the cases where old and new disagree. Cut over when it is flat at zero for a week, not when the tests pass.
6. Writes. One real transaction in test mode, checked by hand, before the phase is called done.
7. Remove the old client in a later release, never the same one.

Stop conditions

• The disagreement metric is not flat → do not cut over, whatever the deadline.
• The phase touches a file another track is rewriting → wait, do not merge.
• The provider's deprecation date moves closer than the remaining phases → say so to the client, in writing, the day you notice.

What this procedure does not cover

Anything with a data migration attached. That is schema-migration, and it is a different set of rules.