From Breaking Changes to Resilient Digital Services: A Framework for Orchestrating Microservice API Versions

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a formally defined interface that enables controlled interaction between software components, and is a key pillar of modern microservice-based architectures. However, asynchronous API changes often lead to breaking compatibility and introduce systemic instability across dependent services. Prior research has explored various strategies to manage such evolution, including contract-based testing, semantic versioning, and continuous deployment safeguards. Nevertheless, a comprehensive orchestration mechanism that formalizes dependency propagation and automates compatibility enforcement remains lacking. In this study, we propose a Compatibility-Driven Version Orchestrator, integrating semantic versioning, contract testing, and CI triggers into a unified framework. We empirically validate the approach on a Kubernetes-based environment, demonstrating improved resilience of microservice systems to breaking changes. This contribution advances the theoretical modeling of cascading failures in microservices, while providing developers and DevOps teams with a practical toolset to improve service stability in dynamic, distributed environments.