Modern API Versioning and Enterprise-Ready AI enablement with Spring Cloud Gateway

Spring Cloud Gateway now adds first-class support for API versioning to help teams evolve services safely and predictably. The addition of API versioning support to Spring Cloud Gateway allows for enhanced version negotiation, enhanced route matching, better backwards compatibility and improved deprecation workflows. By generating, standards-compliant OpenAPI specifications from domain-centric models and action-oriented API endpoint designs, we’ll discuss how shifting toward action-based definitions produces clearer intent, improves cross-team API discoverability, and enables richer tooling support, including compatibility with Model Context Protocol–based client tools. By aligning gateway-defined routes and versioning metadata with well-structured OpenAPI documents, teams can automate client generation, enforce consistency, and improve their use with AI enabled intelligent applications and tools. Thus providing a stable base that lets teams advance their applications into new opportunities. In this session, we’ll walk through practical patterns for header-based, URI-based, and media-type versioning, and show how these strategies integrate seamlessly with the new Spring Boot 4 application model. Attendees will leave with clear guidance on designing developer-friendly, scalable API versioning strategies that align with modern microservice and edge-service architectures.