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Comment by throwthrow564 | Hacker News Reader

> [15] Design APIs with migration to new implementations as a first-class consideration; custom migrations are huge time-sinks and sources of unreliability. Every major API should have a single CLI-driven call for switching implementations.

I've never actually thought about doing this as an initial design principle. I wonder how it materially affects the design.

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The first engineer on the Delos team here. This design decision gave us an edge: we delivered the first production cluster in 8 months by layering over existing systems ; and we smoothly migrated all underlying implementations in the following 2 years without our customer aware of it (0 downtime). This design decision is well captured by the OSDI’20 Virtual Consensus in Delos paper.

Very interesting. How did you deal with the issue where the old API had some feature X that wasn't supported in the new API but some customers depended on feature X?

I guess that a hard question for user facing API: you need to support both the old and the new features during the migration.

In our case, this design principle mostly applied to our internal APIs. Particularly, we designed our internal sub components (consensus protocol, particularly) in a way we can swap it without any downtime.

Right. So it seems you did a lift and shift over two years without changing the basic API surface. That’s ok, but stability of requirements throughout a rearchitecting project is a luxury and not the norm

We use the same principle on some of the frameworks I have worked on, it pushes you to make the API more explicit and keep the context localized. That makes codemods easier. This can sometimes lead to a more verbose / less magical API, but IMO at scale the tradeoff is worth it.

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