Enterprise-Wide Dependency Deprecation

A critical external dependency has a hard, known deprecation deadline. Four independent products are already at different real migration stages: Product A reports migrated — but it was never independently verified. Product B is partially migrated. Product C is blocked by a genuine compatibility issue with the Replacement API. Product D is fully untouched. Every live traffic/error/latency dashboard can read fully healthy for a long time; this is a governance and sequencing problem, not an outage. Six business invariants govern every decision: (1) no critical product may remain dependent on the deprecated API past the hard deadline; (2) a product must not be marked migrated until compatibility and correctness checks pass; (3) dual-support may be temporary but cannot become indefinite hidden debt; (4) a shared compatibility layer must not become a permanent single point of failure; (5) migration order should reflect business criticality and technical dependency risk; (6) deadline risk must remain candidate-visible throughout. Decide how to sequence the four products, whether and how to verify each migration before counting it as done, how to clear Product C's real technical blocker, how much deprecated traffic to drain and how fast, whether a temporary dual-support bridge is worth its ongoing cost, and — critically — whether marking everything "migrated" and walking away is actually safe, or whether the dashboard staying green is hiding a deadline that is about to arrive regardless.

Difficulty

Principal

Expected Time

~30 min

Category

Deployments & Reliability