Zero-Trust API Contract & Backward-Compatibility Engine

Head of Software Automation · 2021 - 2023

Quality & Automation2021 - 2023

Engineered an automated API governance framework across 80+ microservices, stopping breaking API changes in CI before deployment to integration environments.

TypeScriptOpenAPI v3eBPFPactGitHub ActionsKafka

Situation

With 80+ microservices owned by disparate squads, unannounced breaking schema changes (e.g., deleted JSON attributes, type mutations) frequently broke downstream dependencies in staging, delaying release cycles by days.

Task

Create an automated contract validation gateway that detects schema regressions and breaking payload alterations at the pull request phase without running full end-to-end service stacks.

Action

  • eBPF-Driven Schema Extraction: Deployed eBPF probes in development clusters to capture real microservice-to-microservice payload schemas and dynamically generate OpenAPI specifications.
  • Consumer-Driven Contract Engine: Standardized Pact testing rules across squads, baking automated breaking-change analysis (oasdiff) into pre-merge CI checks.
  • Event-Driven Schema Registry: Integrated a centralized schema registry that blocks PR merges if a producer service breaks a registered consumer contract.

Result

  • Prevented 140+ breaking API shifts in CI over a 12-month period.
  • Reduced dependency-related staging outages to zero.