We're shifting from monolith to microservices and struggling with how to manage backward compatibility and API versioning. Should we use URL versioning, headers, or something else?
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I would like to learn api development using python framework, any guidance or course available ?
very helpful. Thanks for sharing the answer
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Great question
Versioning is one of the first growing pains when moving to microservices.
In most real-world systems, URL versioning (/v1/users) is the go-to. It’s clear, cache-friendly, and easy to route/manage. Most teams prefer this for public-facing APIs.
For internal microservices, some teams use header-based versioning when they want cleaner URLs and more flexibility but it can get tricky for debugging and tooling.
That said, versioning should be a last resort. If you can evolve APIs without breaking changes (e.g., add fields instead of changing/removing), that’s ideal.
Start with URL versioning, it’s simple and effective.
Avoid breaking changes where possible.
Use headers only if you really need that level of flexibility.
Hope that helps.