This article was written by Ankit Sobti, CTO at Postman, and appeared first on the company blog.
Since the beginning of Postman, we have been obsessed with helping our users solve problems. And from our vantage point in the industry, we have seen the rise of API-first companies that use APIs as the building blocks of their software strategy. The transition from code-first to API-first is a significant technological shift. To succeed in this world, organizations need a system that integrates the different tools and processes to effectively build, manage, publish, and consume APIs. As a result, we’re seeing more and more legacy companies deconstructing their monoliths to become API-first.
Today, we are proud to announce that our vision—one built on the needs of an API-first organization—has come to life with the launch of the biggest and best version of Postman in our history: Postman v10! In some ways, it might look like this is one year’s worth of work as we released v9 this time last year, but in reality, v10 has been in the works for many years. With v10, we have made improvements to almost every part of the Postman API Platform.
There is lots to cover, so let’s jump right in and learn what makes Postman v10 so exciting.
Native Git support and the redesigned API Builder
After speaking with hundreds of teams to understand their API development workflows better, we introduced the API Builder in Postman v9 as a way of helping teams organize this workflow and have clear checkpoints in the development process. Then we learned from customers that the feature was complex to set up and get started. A lot of teams didn’t have API schemas to start defining their API, especially when dealing with REST APIs.
Here are four huge ways Postman v10’s new API Builder simplifies these workflows:
Postman’s API Builder now integrates natively with Git. This means that you can keep and version collections and schemas next to your codebase and work on them using your team’s pre-existing collaborative version control workflows.
We significantly redesigned the UI around the API lifecycle. These features are now available in a section on the sidebar to allow for a cleaner experience. We see development teams work in a variety of ways, and realized that a guided experience would often just get in the way.
We have simplified the publishing step of creating a version where an API would go from development to consumers. Once development on a branch is complete and a branch is merged to your deployment branch, you can publish the collection and the schema as a new version in the API Builder. Once published, the API will be available for consumers. More on that below.
We also launched a new command-line interface today—Postman CLI. Postman CLI is built atop the foundation we laid with our open-source CLI, Newman. It runs collections using the same runtime as Postman, while deeply integrating with the Postman API Platform. Postman CLI simplifies integrating with your CI system and autogenerates the pipeline code needed for you to integrate your collections and schemas with your CI process.
This tight integration means that you can now see test reports inside Postman workspaces. You can review these reports together as a team and see where your attention needs to be directed.
gRPC support and Postman’s continued expansion into being the single platform for all APIs
For today’s development needs, there are a variety of API technologies available. Postman had its origins in HTTP/REST but we soon learned that the API lifecycle is the same across any technology that is used for building APIs. However, developers suffer from a lack of tooling when a new innovation comes around in the API world. It often takes a decade for tooling to mature. Our vision is for developers not to have to make these trade-offs. Over the last few years, we have added support for SOAP, WebSockets, and GraphQL.
With gRPC emerging as the winning standard for internal microservice communication, we are thrilled to announce that gRPC support within Postman is now fully available with the launch of v10, introducing support for Protobuf definitions, autocomplete hints, tools for documentation, scripting, testing, mocking, and collaboration within Postman workspaces.
Better discovery for internal APIs through the redesigned Private API Network
We’ve been making significant improvements to how organizations discover APIs. A robust set of APIs, built alongside an effective API-first strategy, can create huge benefits. They open up existing capabilities of an organization for reuse by internal teams and reduce the time and resources needed to develop new features for users and customers.
However, private APIs only bring these benefits if they can be discovered by others easily. With the increasing number of private APIs within organizations, it becomes difficult for consumers to find the API they are looking for—leading many teams to invest time and resources in building duplicate functionality.
Today, we’re excited to announce the redesigned Private API Network to address these pain points by helping developers discover relevant APIs faster. The Private API Network provides a central directory of all internal APIs in your organization. Teams will be able to publish workspaces and collections along with APIs built in the API Builder. The publishing flow has been updated to allow for an easy workflow for publishers. The interface also makes it easier for consumers to fork collections and use them in their own workspaces.
Collaborate with your partners through Partner Workspaces
The Postman Public API Network has become the largest hub for APIs on the planet. Companies of all shapes and sizes including the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft, Stripe, and thousands of others are sharing their APIs through public workspaces on the API Network. Public workspaces reduce the time to first call for an API and make it really easy for publishers and consumers to stay in sync as APIs change over time.
However, not all of your APIs might be publicly available. Most organizations have partner APIs—APIs that are accessible to a cohort of select partners due to business, regulatory, or product-related decisions. Collaborating on these APIs has always been difficult. Customers that we spoke to often mentioned slow email-driven processes through which API artifacts including Postman Collections were shared. It was difficult to keep everyone up to date on both partnerships and co-development projects, where a company might contract out work for others to get done.
In v10, we are introducing Partner Workspaces, which provide a shared, secure, access-controlled space where organizations can invite partners to collaborate and build APIs. Users inside the workspace can have Editor or Viewer roles so they can access resources appropriately. Partner Workspaces complete the picture of collaboration that we envisioned. Check out this article on all the different ways you can use workspaces.
Standardize governance and security practices throughout your organization
As APIs proliferate across an organization, it becomes critical that they are built in a standardized way and governed for consistency, as well as regulatory and compliance reasons. As we spoke to customers, the security and governance of APIs continues to be a top-of-mind concern for senior leaders and executives. With Postman v10, we are very excited about launching a new suite of capabilities aimed at helping organizations scale their best practices toward building APIs.
API Security
Requests that you send in Postman now have built-in security validations. Postman will automatically check the API against common vulnerabilities and alert you if there is something wrong. API Security validations are also baked into the Postman API schema editor for the OpenAPI standard. These rules can be customized by security teams and make it easier for developers to discover organizational policies and remove security vulnerabilities at development time.
API Governance
Our new API Governance features will allow you to deploy a company-wide style guide for your APIs. This feature is powered through a customizable linting engine that consists of the most widely adopted open-source community standards with the ability to add your own organization’s rules. These rules will be used to scan your OpenAPI files inside the API editor and also integrated through Postman CLI and in your CI/CD pipelines.
For a high-level overview of your API landscape, you will be able to see reports for your API landscape in the updated Reporting section. Once you start adding APIs, you will be able to track compliance over time and make sure that your organization is producing high-quality APIs.
Get started now
Postman v10 is our biggest leap yet regarding integrated functionality for the entire API lifecycle. All these changes are available as part of our refreshed plans, starting today. If you’re an existing Postman customer, you will continue to enjoy the benefits of features that you had at the time you started your plan. We’ve built v10 to benefit workflows for developers and for the entire organization—and while we have shipped these new features, the Postman engineering team remains continually focused on improving performance and the quality of the entire platform.
We believe you’ll love these capabilities that we’ve added to Postman. Today, we’ve started rolling out Postman v10 to the thousands of companies who’ve already joined our v10 waitlist. You can also join the early access waitlist here.
If you want to learn more about anything in Postman v10 and how we can help you adopt Postman Enterprise, talk to our sales team today.
The post Announcing Postman v10: The API Platform for an API-First World appeared first on Postman Blog.
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