[hirundo]

My sympathies to the coders downstream of this large change for the amount of work required. I would like to add cursor based pagination to the APIs I manage. It would not be an option to go to our clients and explain that offset-pagination will be removed. There seems to be very little cost in supporting both.

[redditor98654]

AWS does the pagination thing for all LIST APIs and they encode the token in a way they clients cannot deconstruct anything out of it. For them it is just an opaque string. In fact it is cryptographically encrypted and not something simple like a Base64 encoding of some Json data.

And the token has enough metadata to reconstruct the query from where it left behind in the previous call and perform additional security checks so that it cannot be used by other customers to get results from a different account.

I have actually migrated databases from Aurora to DynamoDb behind the scenes where customers continued to call these APIs with these tokens and the calls would flip to the new DB and resume from the last place. No downtime or "maintenance window" which would be a non-starter at AWS anyway.

I recommend this for any external service. For internal services, if you work closely enough with your users, may be you can opt for something more transparent.

[mgkimsal]

I didn't see anything specific about timelines. I would expect you'd want to offer both for some length of time, with some deprecation notice and a sunset date for the older approach. But perhaps they seem use cases in their logs that the current offset is used minimally already, and it's better to switch now vs later if/when adoption is higher?