API Versioning & Backward Compatibility
Evolve gRPC microservice APIs safely across many teams using versioning strategies and protobuf compatibility rules so old clients never break.
The Versioning Challenge
In a microservice estate, dozens of clients depend on a service. You cannot redeploy them all at once, so the API must change without breaking existing callers.
Wire Compatibility in Protobuf
Protobuf is forgiving: unknown fields are ignored, and missing fields take defaults. This makes additive changes safe by design.
All lessons in this course
- Designing gRPC Microservices
- Event-Driven gRPC Architectures
- Cross-Language Interoperability
- API Versioning & Backward Compatibility