Breaking changes and deprecations

Handling of breaking changes and deprecations

Breaking changes

Breaking changes are defined as a change to any of the following that cause compilation errors or undesirable runtime behavior to an existing 3rd party consumer application or script after upgrading to the next stable minor version of a Dapr artifact (SDK, CLI, runtime, etc):

  • Code behavior
  • Schema
  • Default configuration value
  • Command line argument
  • Published metric
  • Kubernetes CRD template
  • Publicly accessible API
  • Publicly visible SDK interface, method, class, or attribute

Breaking changes can be applied right away to the following cases:

  • Projects versioned at 0.x.y
  • Preview feature
  • Alpha API
  • Preview or Alpha interface, class, method or attribute in SDK
  • Dapr Component in Alpha or Beta
  • Components-Contrib interface
  • URLs in Docs and Blog
  • An exceptional case where it is required to fix a critical bug or security vulnerability.

Process for applying breaking changes

There is a process for applying breaking changes:

  1. A deprecation notice must be posted as part of a release.
  2. The breaking changes are applied two (2) releases after the release in which the deprecation was announced.
    • For example, feature X is announced to be deprecated in the 1.0.0 release notes and will then be removed in 1.2.0.

Deprecations

Deprecations can apply to

  1. APIs, including alpha APIs
  2. Preview features
  3. Components
  4. CLI
  5. Features that could result in security vulnerabilities

Deprecations appear in release notes under a section named “Deprecations”, which indicates:

  • The point in the future the now-deprecated feature will no longer be supported. For example release x.y.z. This is at least two (2) releases prior.
  • Document any steps the user must take to modify their code, operations, etc if applicable in the release notes.

After announcing a future breaking change, the change will happen in 2 releases or 6 months, whichever is greater. Deprecated features should respond with warning but do nothing otherwise.

Announced deprecations

FeatureDeprecation announcementRemoval
GET /v1.0/shutdown API (Users should use POST API instead)1.2.01.4.0
Java domain builder classes deprecated (Users should use setters instead)Java SDK 1.3.0Java SDK 1.5.0
Service invocation will no longer provide a default content type header of application/json when no content-type is specified. You must explicitly set a content-type header for service invocation if your invoked apps rely on this header.1.7.01.9.0
gRPC service invocation using invoke method is deprecated. Use proxy mode service invocation instead. See How-To: Invoke services using gRPC to use the proxy mode.1.9.01.10.0
The CLI flag —app-ssl (in both the Dapr CLI and daprd) has been deprecated in favor of using —app-protocol with values https or grpcs. daprd:6158 cli:12671.11.01.13.0

Last modified June 19, 2023: Merge pull request #3565 from dapr/aacrawfi/skip-secrets-close (b1763bf)