[bb88]

But isn't that a self-inflicted wound then? I mean is there some reason your devs decided not to fix the DB cluster? Or did management tell you "Eh, we have other things we want to prioritize this month/quarter/year?"

This seems like simply not following the rules with having a monorepo, because the DB Cluster is not running the version in the repo.

[Denvercoder9]

Maybe the database upgrade from v(N-17) to v(N-16) simply takes a while, and hasn't completed yet? Or the responsible team is looking at it, but it doesn't warrant the whole company to stop shipping?

Being 17 versions behind is an extreme example, but always having everything run the latest version in the repo is impossible, if only because deployments across nodes aren't perfectly synchronised.

[array_key_first]

This is why you have active/passive setup and you don't run half-deployed code in production. Using API contracts is a weak solution, because eventually you will write a bug. It's simpler to just say "everything is running the same version" and make that happen.