Question

A retail company is retiring a legacy internal reporting API that dozens of unknown downstream teams may still call. The platform team must decommission the service without causing surprise outages, while gathering evidence about who still depends on it. Which approach best balances safe deprecation with stakeholder change management?

Accepted Answer

Instrument the API to log and report caller identity and usage metrics, announce a formal deprecation timeline with a hard sunset date, add HTTP warning headers, and progressively return errors during scheduled brownout windows before final shutdown.

Answer

Immediately shut down the API and monitor support tickets to identify which teams were affected, then help them migrate afterward.

Answer

Leave the API running indefinitely in read-only mode and build a parallel replacement, letting teams migrate whenever they choose with no deadline.

Answer

Send a single company-wide email announcing the shutdown date and remove the service on that date regardless of remaining traffic.