How to Find Business Value in Your Data Through Modernization
In an era when usage of APIs is approaching unprecedented levels, the management of the workflow process associated with developing hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of APIs has become exceedingly complex.
To bring some order to the API chaos, Postman this week launched a platform for managing the toolchain associated with creating APIs. Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana says Postman Pro provides a mechanism through which developers can collaboratively work on developing and documenting APIs using a framework that also provides the ability to monitor the usage and responsiveness of those APIs.
Asthana notes that many IT organizations fail to appreciate all the dependencies that exist between APIs. Postman Pro provides a means to not only keep track of those dependencies, but also discover how changes to an API affect every other API that relies on it.
In addition, Asthana notes that given all those dependencies, it can take as much as six months to bring a new developer up to speed on the application environment. Postman Pro, says Asthana, is designed to reduce that time to a matter of days and weeks.
“We make onboarding a new developer much simpler,” says Asthana.
In general, the rise of microservices based on containers such as Docker is about to also drive even more rapid escalation of API consumption and development. Each container houses a granular set of software functions that each expose and consume APIs. Enterprise IT organizations may realize the number of APIs distributed across the enterprise could soon easily number in the thousands.
Of course, no one can manage what they can’t see in the first place. As APIs become the integration mechanism around which the rest of the enterprise revolves, finding ways to manage APIs that are constantly being updated is likely to become a much higher priority for large and small IT organizations alike.
