Application program interfaces are nifty enablers of modern information technology and digital business. They allow for the integration of multicloud computing environments, and for apps to easily beam data to countless others. Companies can even monetize their APIs by allowing other companies to use and integrate them. Suffice it to say that the more APIs around, the better for us all.

Postman Inc. is trying to make it easier for all kinds of people to develop, tweak and monitor APIs. It began as a platform primarily for individual developers. Today, however, many more people are working with APIs, and Postman is evolving to cater to them as well, according to Joyce Lin (pictured), developer evangelist at Postman.

Lin spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the DevNet Create event in Mountain View, California. They discussed Postman’s growth and how it’s serving a diverse market with easy-to-use tools for API development (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Lin in our Startup of the Week feature.

API invasion

Essentially, what an API does is request specific data from a database for use in an application. “We found a lot more people are interacting with technology or working at tech companies where they might not have the setup to initiate … an API request,” Lin said. “Postman allows them to — on their desktop — be able to interact with the tech in a way that normally they wouldn’t have the whole set up to do.” 

The Postman platform now caters to individual developers, as well as large teams of developers and enterprises. It provides tools for users to quickly and easily iterate API development and scale APIs in production.

Platforms and services that make it easier to build and manage APIs are having interesting ripple effects. An API exchange between businesses is emerging. Companies can now easily create APIs and share them with others for profit. “I view this a continuation of the API promise,” Ed Anuff, director of product management for Google Cloud Platform, recently told theCUBE.

AccuWeather Inc. used Apigee — the API management platform from Google Cloud Platform — to create an API portal for developers. “Everything is APIs, and we also say, everything is impacted by the weather — so why not have everyone use AccuWeather APIs to fulfill their weather needs?” Mark Iannelli, senior technical account manager at AccuWeather, told theCUBE, adding that the API created a whole new revenue stream for the company.

In fact, a highly sought-after API can bring massive value to a company. Expedia Affiliate Network’s API reportedly accounts for 90% of the company’s $2 billion yearly revenue.

APIs are touted as the answer to distributed IT’s communication breakdowns. Many companies now have scattered environments with a lot of moving parts lacking native compatibility. “You look at a retailer — they have users using mobile apps, they have remote stores, they have data centers, they have public cloud, and then they’re using containers [a virtualized method for running distributed applications],” Hussein Khazaal, vice president of marketing and partnerships at Nuage Networks, recently told theCUBE.

So how do they stitch all that together? “The three letters are A-P-I,” Khazaal said.

APIs get all those scattered elements in multicloud talking to each other. This enables the integration across environments that is key for holistic operations, analytics, etc. 

Netting the API swarm

A large swarm of APIs interacting with each other can become difficult to manage.

“With an ever-increasing number of APIs and applications, developers can’t possibly be expected to keep up with the scale of growth or the pace of change,” according to Ross Garrett, vice president of product for Cloud Elements Inc. “RESTful APIs have created a strong and lasting foundation for innovation, but we need more. More technologies and integration patterns. More security to increase trust. More standards to help interoperability. More analytics to inform decisions. More openness to drive transformation. More tools to ease integration. And more governance to manage complexity,” he said in a recent report titled “State of API Integration.”

Nearly 55% of respondents to Cloud Element’s survey are using APIs to build B2B products; 36% use them to build mobile products; 29% for B2C/consumer products; 26% for employee productivity; and 22% for internet of things applications.

One-stop API shop

Postman bills itself as “the only complete API platform.” Its tools support every stage of the API lifecycle
from design to production and monitoring. The platform has grown astronomically since its birth in 2014. It now boasts 6 million users and over 130 million APIs. It listens to its vast community of users to decide how to tweak the platform and what tools to deliver, Lin explained.

Some features that make designing and testing APIs easier include mock servers. Users can essentially mock an API for parallel development or to build a prototype. After testing, they can swap out the mock server with a real one.

One notable customer, Cisco Systems Inc., influenced Postman to make the platform more friendly to large teams of developers. “Teams like Cisco — you’ll be lucky if you find a team of 10 people. These are hundreds and thousands of developers, coming together to work together. So, Postman as a tool, has shifted from focusing on only the developer to how do you support developers working in larger teams?” Lin stated. 

Postman has a “freemium” model that lets individual developers and teams of all skill levels try features before upgrading. “Within the last year, we’ve scooched almost anything that used to be a paid feature down to free so you can try it out,” Lin said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevNet Create event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the DevNet Create event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE