Best Practices for Deprecating and Removing an API
A few weeks ago, our alert klaxons started blaring (alert notifications – we don’t really have klaxons, but maybe we should). We had a massive spike in failed background jobs. With the scale of data processing at Instrumental, a few minutes of background jobs is potentially hundreds of millions of data points. Our internal monitoring quickly proved that while our data pipeline was safe, all our API calls to Intercom were failing. Intercom had removed a critical API call we used to manage our customer service and product marketing. Our on-call team was forced to drop everything, and begin writing, testing, and deploying an emergency fix across all our products.