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Tag: Postman

  • Postman Survey Shows Focus on Building and Deploying APIs

    Postman Survey Shows Focus on Building and Deploying APIs

    A survey of more than 28,000 developers and application programming interface (API) professionals published today by Postman found nearly half of respondents (49%) are now spending the majority of their time developing APIs. More than a quarter (28%) now spend 20 or more hours per week working with APIs.

    Kin Lane, chief evangelist for Postman, a provider of a platform for building APIs, said that shift reflects an increase in software development and integration activity that began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost two-thirds of respondents (63%) said the pandemic somewhat or significantly affected their work, with almost half of those respondents noting that changes made with their organization were enabled and supported by APIs.

    Additionally, a full 94% of respondents said the investment of time and resources into APIs will increase or stay the same for the next 12 months. The biggest obstacle to creating APIs is lack of time (45%) while the biggest obstacle to consuming an API is lack of documentation (55%). In terms of API goals, the survey found that quality (80%), agility (66%) and reliability (65%) are the top three goals among survey respondents.

    However, the survey also noted only a third of respondents said they could build and deploy an API in anywhere from a single day to a week, with most requiring one week to a month. About one-third also said they deploy APIs to production between once per week and once per month. More than 80% of respondents noted that less than 25% of their changes fail while a similar percentage said they can recover in less than a day with a third reporting they fully recover in less than an hour.

    The Postman survey also found that more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) have less than five years of experience with API development. Only half of respondents indicated that they agree or strongly agree that the leadership of their API team has a clear sense of where their API practice should be in five years. However, microservices (58%) and Kubernetes (50%), containers (46%), serverless architecture (44%) and GraphQL (35%) were ranked among the technologies that respondents were most excited about heading into 2022.

    On the plus side, more than 60% of respondents felt their API leadership and governance teams demonstrated a “willingness to change” as well as duly considering “the interests and opinions of employees.” When it comes to regularly providing feedback and process, more than half of leadership and governance teams (53%) scored well.

    The top two ways API teams collaborate is via a dedicated collaboration platform (50%) or by publishing API artifacts to repositories such as GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket (45%), according to the Postman survey. The most widely used DevOps tools are Jenkins (37%), Azure DevOps (26%), GitHub Actions (25%), AWS DevOps (23%) and GitLab Pipelines (22%).

    In terms of deploying APIs, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms are the most widely employed (57%), followed by deploying APIs in the cloud (38%), frameworks (34%) and custom-built deployment methods (27%).

    Just over 70% of respondents ranked security and performance as the top factors considered when integrating with an API. When producing an API, however, the top factors are integration with internal systems, integration with external systems, adding functionality to an internal system and enhancing functionality for an end customer. Similarly, when consuming an API the top factors are integration with external systems, adding functionality for end customers, adding functionality to internal systems and integration between internal systems.

    In general, Lane noted that, as more APIs are developed and deployed to drive various digital business transformation initiatives, organizations will need to pay more attention to API discovery and management. There’s a tendency for different teams within organizations to not only create redundant APIs but also forget about so-called zombie APIs that are no longer supported but can still be exploited by cybercriminals.

    Overall, Lane said the survey makes it clear more organizations are pursuing an API-first approach to digital transformation. The challenge now is managing all the APIs that can quickly become too much of a good thing.

  • “2020 Postman State of the API” Reveals API Investments Will Remain Strong

    More than 13,500 respondents told Postman that while the pandemic put the world on hold, API development continues to surge.

    SAN FRANCISCO (Businesswire) September 24, 2020 –– Postman, the leading collaboration platform for API development, today released the results of its 2020 State of the API Report. The annual report, the largest and most comprehensive survey of the API industry, surveyed 13,586 API developers, testers, executives, and others to understand who is working with APIs, how they are getting their work done, and where they see the industry headed.

    Key survey findings:

    • API investments have remained strong: Close to half of respondents stated that investment of time and resources into APIs will increase over the next 12 months, while another third stated that investments into APIs will stay the same, despite a challenging economic environment.
    • The pandemic has changed the world, but it didn’t stop APIs: 89% of industry members surveyed stated that their organizations offered remote work options as a result of COVID-19. Nearly a third (30.6%) said that APIs played a role in their organization’s ability to respond to COVID-19 by facilitating customer communications, powering remote work options, and quickly responding to regulatory changes and government initiatives.
    • APIs are the nucleus of digital transformation: For those working on digital transformation initiatives, 84.5% state that APIs are playing a significant role in those initiatives.

    “Our annual survey reveals that the API ecosystem is expanding, investments are flowing, and momentum for an API-first philosophy is being embraced more and more, ” said Abhinav Asthana, Postman’s co-founder and CEO. “The data also shows us the importance of APIs and their role in responding to sudden and tectonic shifts in the way businesses, governments, and nonprofits operate, including pandemics.”

    Over 60% of survey respondents rated themselves as 5 or better (out of 10) in terms of embracing an “API-first” philosophy, which indicates a groundswell toward API-first. The API industry also continues to touch just about every job role, from developers to management to sales, and even to the C-suite. In fact, 1 in 10 of those working with APIs today are in management roles—from the C-suite through to directors and managers.

    “After a full review of the data, we found that more than 7 in 10 respondents said the most important factors they consider before integrating with APIs were reliability, security, performance, and documentation,” said Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane, who works with many companies that are integrating APIs. “However, less than half of the respondents indicated that pricing was an important factor.”

    Additional survey findings:

    • Lack of time (52.3%) is the number one obstacle to producing APIs. Lack of documentation (54.3%) is the number one obstacle to consuming APIs.
    • Respondents felt they should spend more time designing (11% of their time, in an ideal world) and automating testing (15%) for APIs, and less time debugging APIs (10%) than what they experience in real life: Only 8.7% of time is spent designing APIs and 11% of time is spent automating API testing, while 17% of time is spent debugging APIs.
    • REST (93.4%) is the dominant architectural style, followed by webhooks (34.4%), SOAP (33.4%) and GraphQL (22.5%). JSON Schema (75.6%) is the dominant API specification, followed by Swagger 2.0 (43.9%) and OpenAPI 3.0 (27.8%).
    • Microservices (48.7%) is the future technology respondents are most excited about, followed by Kubernetes (43.6%) and containers (42.2%).

    About Postman
    Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 12 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs—quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where the company was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Insight Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and CRV. Learn more at http://www.postman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @getpostman.

  • Postman Launches New Web Client to Simplify API Development

    Customers can now access Postman from web browsers, allowing them to more easily improve the speed and scope of API development.

    SAN FRANCISCO — September 2, 2020 — Postman, the leading platform for API development, announced the launch of Postman for the web, a new browser interface for Postman that offers users simplified access and superior collaboration. The move marks somewhat of a return to Postman’s original roots.

    “Postman started off as a Chrome plug-in on the web, and then switched to a desktop application with amazing adoption,” said Postman CEO and Co-founder Abhinav Asthana. “We’re now returning to the web to harness the full power of the internet, and make API development faster, more collaborative, and more scalable.”

    The rapid growth of API development on Postman
    Since launching in 2015, Postman has seen huge growth in the number of API requests and collections. Postman has now powered more than 1 billion API requests and has also seen a massive increase in the number of API collections, with more than 48 million API collections  now running on Postman.

    This staggering growth, and the accompanying increase in demand for high-scale and performant API development tools, is what led to the creation of the new web version of Postman.

    “Companies building APIs are now looking to scale up the speed and scope of their API development processes in ways that simply weren’t possible five years ago. Postman on the web is an ideal solution for these demands,” said Asthana.

    Postman on the Web
    Until today, Postman users have accessed Postman through a desktop application. Accessing Postman through the browser has been one of the most-requested features from users; they say that downloading a desktop app can slow down onboarding, and can also make it challenging to stay on the latest version. Plus, the browser approach allows certain collaboration capabilities that aren’t possible within the app. The web version of Postman solves all of these issues by providing the following:

    • Simplified user access and onboarding: Users get instant access via browser with no app installation required, automatic updates, and faster user onboarding (i.e., just paste in the URL and go).
    • Optimized collaboration through deep linking: Now that Postman is on the web, everything in Postman has a URL, so users can easily share URLs to granular API elements for superior collaboration.
    • The ability to send requests at scale from the browser:  A unique agent architecture, developed exclusively by Postman engineers (see details below), facilitates scalable sending of API requests from the browser.

    Try out the web version of Postman HERE.

    The Postman agent
    Tightly connected to the Postman for the web client launch is the Postman agent. The agent was specifically designed to overcome the cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) limitations of browsers to allow for API requests to be scalably sent from a browser interface. By creating a proxy micro-application to facilitate API request-sending at scale, the agent conquers this browser challenge in a way that’s never been done before.

    “One of the fundamental limitations that Postman faced in building a great browser experience was the CORS limitation, which made it impossible to send API requests at scale from the browser; this constraint was ultimately why Postman decided to build a desktop app in the first place,” said Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane. “The Postman agent is a big technical breakthrough for the company that overcomes a fundamental limitation in browser-based applications that need to connect to APIs at scale.”

    Learn more details about the creation of the Postman agent HERE.

    High-performance API development on desktop and web
    As the scale and scope of API development has rapidly increased, the Postman team has been continuously working to improve the performance of Postman for every user. The chart below (Table 1) shows a sampling of these performance enhancements on both the desktop app and the web version of Postman.

    (Table 1)

    Postman desktop

    v7.18.0 

    (February 2020)

    		 Postman desktop

    v7.28.0

    (August 2020)

    		 Postman on the web

    (August 2020)
    Opening Postman 6.5 secs 4.5 secs 3.2 secs
    Joining a team workspace ~5 secs ~2 secs ~2 secs
    Resuming work in a busy team workspace ~5-10 secs ~3 secs ~3 secs
    Switching workspaces ~5 secs ~2 secs ~2 secs
    Memory usage when working with multiple workspaces 350MB – 1150MB 130MB – 430 MB 130 MB – 430 MB
    Typing URLs in an active workspace 300-800 ms 60 ms 60 ms
    Opening new tabs 300 ms 100 ms 100 ms
    Searching in sidebar 500 ms 50ms 50ms
    Opening an environment quicklook 60 ms 25 ms 25 ms
    Downloading large responses 30 MB Up to 150 MB Feature not yet enabled on web

    About Postman

    Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 12 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs—quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where the company was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Insight Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and CRV. Learn more at http://www.postman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @getpostman.

  • Survey Sees More Complex API Challenges Ahead

    Survey Sees More Complex API Challenges Ahead

    A survey of more than 10,000 developers of application programming interfaces (APIs) suggests there’s lots of room for improving the overall efficiency of API lifecycle management.

    The survey was conducted by Postman, a provider of a platform for building APIs. Respondents on average said they only spend a quarter of their time (26%) on the development of APIs. The rest of the time is consumed by debugging and manual testing (22%), automated testing (11%), designing and mocking APIs (11%), managing others (9%), documentation (7%), monitoring (6%) and publishing (4%). A full 70% said they are spending more time on manual testing and debugging than they thought they should.

    All that time spent on manual testing and debugging may be having an adverse impact on the number of APIs that can be built, tested and deployed at a time when a transition to microservices-based architectures is requiring organizations to build and support more than ever.

    According to the survey results, about a quarter of respondents (24%) work with more than 20 APIs. Well over half those employed on average (53%) are for internal use, compared to 28% employed specifically for integration and 19% that are made public.

    In terms of technologies survey respondents are most excited about for the coming year, microservices (54%), containers (46%) and serverless computing frameworks (44%) top the list.

    As far as the performance is concerned, survey respondents are evenly split. Just under half (48%) said they feel that their APIs do not break, stop working or materially change specification often enough to matter. However, 28% said these issues arise on a monthly basis, while 16% said they deal with these issues weekly. Another 3% said it was a daily challenge.

    In terms of security, survey respondents are relatively confident: Nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) said they feel that their APIs are “very secure” or have “above-average security.” Only 2% said they felt they were not at all secure.

    It’s hard to say how secure any API is without testing it. Rebecca Johnston-Gilbert, a marketing manager for Postman, said it’s apparent more organizations are starting to address security at the design phase rather than after the API has been built and deployed. Many organizations have already adopted an API-first approach to application development that enables them to manage them in isolation from the applications they are designed to support, she said.

    Among other survey findings, 73% of survey respondents said they work on a team of 10 members or less, while a quarter (26%) work on teams with 22 to 50 members. In addition, 78% of respondents have five or fewer years of experience in developing APIs.

    In general, survey respondents said they would like to see improvements in the areas of documentation (64%), standardization (59%) and sample code (58%), which suggests consuming APIs is still not all that simple.

    There is no doubt organizations increasingly will be applying best DevOps practices to the building and maintaining APIs. The challenge organizations face is, not only do they need to build and maintain what could soon be hundreds (if not thousands) of APIs to support microservices but also those APIs will need to be a lot more resilient as the dependencies between microservices exponentially increase.

    — Mike Vizard

  • 2019 Postman “State of the API” Report Reveals APIs Expanding Beyond Developers

    A new survey of more than 10,000 respondents found that more non-developers now work with APIs than ever before as the API ecosystem expands.

    SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Postman, the leading collaboration platform for API development, today released the results of its annual 2019 Postman “State of the API” Report. The report is based on a survey of more than 10,000 API developers, users, testers, and executives. The respondents provided insights on everything from how their time with APIs is spent to what they see as the most significant issues and opportunities for APIs in 2020.

    While the survey reports that more developers work with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) than anyone else in a typical organization, the reach of APIs is increasingly touching more people than just those who code. Only 46.6% of respondents identified as being either a front-end or back-end developer (compared to 58.6% last year), with QA engineers, technical team leads, API architects, DevOps specialists, and others rounding out the field.

    “This year’s survey data reveals that the API ecosystem is expanding beyond developers,” said Abhinav Asthana, Postman’s co-founder and CEO. “Working directly with APIs has become part of a surprising number of positions, including non-developers such as executives and technical writers, which we think is an intriguing trend.”

    Key data highlights from the survey include:

    API Security: While API security is a hot topic—driven by frequent reports of API security breaches and misuse—respondents feel confident in their API security postures. Nearly three-quarters feel that their APIs are “very secure” or have “above-average security.” Only 2.4% stated that their APIs were not at all secure.

    API Documentation: The most helpful enhancement that API producers can make is to provide better examples in the documentation (63.5%), followed by standardization (59.4%) and sample code (57.8%). API consumers also find real-world use cases, better workflows, additional tools, and SDKs helpful, although to a lesser extent.

    Additional data points:

    • Experience: 78.2% of developers have 5 or fewer years of experience developing APIs; 12.2% have 10 or more years of experience
    • Team Size: 72.6% work on teams of 10 members or less, 25.7% on 22-50 member teams, and 1.7% on 50+ member teams
    • Time Spent: 26.1% of time is spent on development, 22.2% on debugging and manual testing, 11.4% on automated testing, 11.2% on designing and mocking, 9.1% on managing others, 7.3% on documentation, 5.7% on monitoring, 3.6% on publishing, and 3.3% on writing about APIs (NOTE: 70% spend more time on manual testing and debugging than they thought they should)
    • Number of APIs: 39% generally work with 1-5 APIs, 22% with 6-10, 14% with 11-20, 11% with 20-50, and 13% work with more than 50 APIs
    • Internal vs. External: 52.8% of APIs used are internal, 28.4% used were shared only among integration partners, and 18.8% used are public
    • Performance: 47.6% feel that their APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter, 28.4% said it happens monthly, 15.7% weekly, and 3.2% daily
    • Industry: 52.3% work in technology, 41.2% in business and/or IT services, followed in order by banking and finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, government/defense, advertising/agencies, nonprofits, and a variety of other industries
    • Technology: 53.9% said microservices is the most exciting technology for developers in the next year, while 45.5% said containers and 44.0% said serverless architecture (NOTE: OpenAPI 3.0, GraphQL, HTTP 2.0, and WebSocket were also considerations)

    The complete “State of the API” report can be found here: https://www.getpostman.com/resources/infographics/api-survey-2019/

    About Postman:

    Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 8 million developers and 400,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs – quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where it was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Nexus Venture Partners and CRV. Learn more at http://www.getpostman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @getpostman.

  • Postman Announces Growing Adoption for API Development Tools

    Ranked highest for industry awareness, nearly six million developers and 200,000 companies now use Postman worldwide

     

    SAN FRANCISCO–January 23, 2019–Postman, the only complete API development environment, today announced that adoption of its award-winning API tool has reached nearly six million developers and more than 200,000 companies worldwide. Combined with the highest awareness among API developers, as measured by the company’s 2019 brand recognition survey, and key solution enhancements in 2018, this growth demonstrates Postman’s leadership in delivering a flexible, elegant tool for building connected software that supports developers across the entire API development lifecycle.

     

    In addition, Postman released the results of its new API Developer Brand Recognition survey. The survey was conducted by Dimensional Research and included  developers who spend at least 10 percent of their time working with APIs.  According to survey findings, the Postman brand came to mind first as offering API tools, platforms and/or solutions for 26 percent of respondents, outpacing companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM, as well as all direct competitors where Postman also recorded an aided awareness of 82 percent.

     

    In 2018, Postman expanded the functionality of its app to address developer needs for more flexibility and customizability, keeping pace with the increasing demands of API development. It launched several key product enhancements in 2018:

     

    • Postman Workspaces delivers increased collaboration for both individuals and teams, and further upgrades allow private workspaces for enterprise users, helping to streamline project management for all Postman users while adding a level of security and confidentiality to team projects.

     

    • Postman Enterprise is built upon the rich features of Postman Pro, including Workspaces, that make organizing and managing multiple API development teams simple and secure in a plan specifically designed to address the additional security and support needs of enterprise customers.

     

    • Postman 6.2 introduced a new Team Plan for free users as well as an innovative Sessions capability which allows teams to work more effectively through the addition of session-specific collection, environment and global variables. Session variables stay local, allowing developers to work comfortably with sensitive information.

     

    Postman also released a new Templates feature in 2018 that allows API developers to create and share their code with anyone and most recently announced support for importing OpenAPI 3.0 specifications. These updates provide developers with more choices across formats and integrate Postman even more seamlessly into the API development workflow.

     

    “We’re living in an API-first world, and the pressure to increase development velocity while simultaneously improving release quality is higher than ever,” said Abhinav Asthana, Postman’s co-founder and CEO. “Postman delivers that combination, and has grown successfully in 2018 ― reaching  new user milestones, and  also doubling our workforce to further the momentum. When a blue-chip company enters the market naming us as the standard, we know we’re on the right path, and we plan to continue leading the way.”

     

    Rounding out the year’s accomplishments, Postman was a 2018 CODiE finalist for Best API Management Platform and named Best API Tool by StackShare. It also hosted the inaugural Postman conference, 2018 POST/CON in San Francisco, a sold-out gathering of API publishers, developers and experts that featured learnings, tutorials and industry perspectives.

     

    The new brand recognition survey also reported that 62 percent of developers use Postman . Additionally, 59 percent are likely to recommend Postman, positioning the app as the most used API dev environment and the most likely to be recommended. The Postman app includes all the features that support the API development lifecycle end-to-end ― from design and mock to debug, automated test, document, monitor, and publish. It is free at the individual and small-team usage levels. Postman offers paid plans to meet higher usage and enterprise functionality and security requirements.

     

    About Postman:

    Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly six million developers and more than 200,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible tool used to build connected software via APIs — quickly, easily and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where it was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at http://www.getpostman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @postmanclient.

  • Postman Announces Team Plan for Free Users

    New Features Improve Collaboration and Teamwork for All API Developers

    SAN FRANCISCO — August 9, 2018 — Postman, provider of the only complete API development environment (or ADE), today announced major updates to its ubiquitous Postman app. Starting immediately, all Postman free users will be able to create Postman teams, use team workspaces and use all of Postman’s valuable collaboration features. Prior to this update, teams were available exclusively to customers of Postman’s paid plans, Pro and Enterprise. With today’s release, all Postman users will be able to use the same features of Postman previously enjoyed by paid users and in quantities scaled for individuals and small projects.

     

    In addition, Postman 6.2 includes a new feature called Sessions, which allows teams to work more effectively through the addition of session-specific collection, environment and global variables. Session variables are not synced to the cloud, allowing developers to work comfortably with sensitive information while knowing it will stay local to their Postman instance. This gives developers more flexibility in working with APIs in Postman and reduces security concerns.

     

    “Teams are the foundation of API development,” said Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of Postman. “Now, every developer can invite their entire team to Postman, improving collaboration and making their API workflow more effective.”

    “We were one of the original beta testers when Postman first introduced the team collaboration feature,” said Todd Parsnick, technical supervisor at UCSF, Eureka. ”Our team has found collaboration invaluable, so it’s great to see this feature available to individuals and small teams via the free Postman app.”

    About Postman

    Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible tool used to build connected software via APIs — quickly, easily and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where it was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at http://www.getpostman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @postmanclient.