Hey everyone, I'm trying to understand what the best practices are around versioning for GRPC. There have been a number of strategies employed in the world of RESTful APIs (like versioning headers), and protobuf's are typically argued as being cross-compatible as long as you make changes in a reasonable set of ways. I'm however struggling to understand how it would be possible to allow cross-version compatibility when it comes to new features being added to existing RPCs whilst still dealing with older servers.
For instance, if I have an RPC method that permits searching a data-set, and I later want to add a field which allows you to search with a higher degree of data consistency. If a newer client were to send this field, a potentially older server might ignore this and not apply the new semantics, leading to the results being silently incorrect. I see a couple of mechanism that could solve this, namely: a. Have servers reject fields they do not understand. This seems like a bad choice since it precludes other kinds of non-breaking changes. b. Use some form versioning header such that using the new fields requires you to advertise being a 'new client' and old servers would reject those requests. This seems like unneccessary overhead. c. Add a new major version of the service (ie: adding my_service.v2 in addition to my_service.v1). This seems frustrating to deal with, since you have to duplicate the entire surface area of the API simply to iterate on a specific method. d. Add versions to individual RPCs (ie: adding MyQueryV2() in addition to MyQuery()). I don't really see any examples of this 'in the wild' though, and seems like a messy solution. None of these solutions seem great or particularly often used, so I'm hoping there might be some beautiful and elegant solution I'm missing :) Thanks, Brett -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "grpc.io" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to grpc-io+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/grpc-io/bec19f82-553c-462b-b84d-e48b0f03e47bn%40googlegroups.com.
