What is API versioning and why is it needed?

API versioning is the practice of creating multiple variants of an Application Programming Interface (API) to support varying clients and use cases. As microservice architectures become the norm, API versioning is critical due to the myriad of services that need stable communication between them. A proper versioning strategy mitigates potential downtime that could occur if that communication channel has a change invoked.

Versioning is the strategy that enables API providers to introduce new features, improve performance, or squash bugs without disrupting the applications or the users that rely on previous versions of an API.

API versioning is essential to foster a smooth developer experience and a stable, evolving product without disrupting existing integrations​