Creating and distributing APIs could soon be easier: Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, is working on it.
“We started by working on a major problem, one that any developer has faced, that is drastically simplifying the way developers can deliver APIs to end users,” said CEO Sagar Batchu.
However, large companies with more than 5000 developers are already fighting API sprawl, according to a survey backed by Postman's API Platform in its report on API status of 2023. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed in these large companies cited “managing too many APIs or microservices” as a barrier to producing APIs, compared to just 23% of all respondents.
It's easy to see how this finding connects to the recently announced acquisition of Postman and the upcoming integration of Akita Software, the API observability startup. “The addition of Akita will make easier than ever for users to manage their production APIs, even in the face of API expansion,” it states in a press release.
According to Akita founder Jean Yang, the rise of APIs has fundamentally changed the software development process. “More and more tests have moved into production. The predicted behavior is now based on the observed behavior. Increasingly, the only way for teams to find out what's working is by inspecting production. We need new tools that meet developers where they are: not just for creating the first draft of software, but for debugging, maintenance, and the umpteenth draft,” he wrote.
This note shows that the chaos engineering no longer the exclusive domain of site reliability engineers.
Originally developed in large companies to help them test systems for test, performance, chaos, etc. in production, it can now be tested in development, broadening its impact. “Steadybit co-founder and CEO Benjamin Wilms said that by moving testing back into the development pipeline, you involve non-specialists, so they can deal with issues before they hit production.”
While chaos testing isn't limited to APIs, the two can go hand in hand. "Teams can significantly benefit from integrating Postman's end-to-end API testing capabilities into Steadybit for chaos engineering experimentation," the German startup's product manager Manuel Gerding wrote in a post. tutorial on the subject.
However, API resiliency is not just a technical challenge; It is also a human resources problem. Noting recent tech layoffs, Postman warned that "companies with disorganized and poorly documented APIs may discover unexpected problems when developers leave."
One of the main concerns, the report noted, is "zombie APIs." “These APIs are not owned, monitored, or maintained, and are sometimes forgotten by the business. At their worst, zombie APIs are a security risk; At the least negative, they provide a bad consumer experience.”
Internal API catalogs can help prevent zombie APIs, and a French startup called Bump could help easily document and catalog their APIs. "The company automatically generates documentation for its APIs so that other teams always know how to use certain APIs."
Reading about internal API catalogs is reminiscent of a broader trend: the rise of platform engineering and its corollary, internal developer portals. They are all connected to the same need: for developers to be efficient, they need to quickly know what resources are available to them. And of course, it doesn't hurt that it will also make your organizations more secure.
