DEV Community: Arlemi

What’s New in Postman: 2022 H1 Releases

Arlemi — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 17:53:08 +0000

Did you know that Postman now has native support for gRPC APIs? Or that you can get Postman monitoring alerts directly sent to Slack or New Relic?

There are many other Postman product updates that may be interesting to you, and we thought it was about time to give you an update! Keep reading if you want to know more, or catch the “Unboxing What’s New in Q2” webinar where the Postman developer relations team walks you through Postman’s latest updates since the beginning of 2022.

We’ve categorized improvements by type to make it easier to jump to what may interest you most. Now, let’s have a look!

Integrations

GitLab: Following the introduction of GitHub and Bitbucket support in Postman last year, we’ve now added support for GitLab and GitLab enterprise. Read more
API Monitoring: Postman allows you to extend your API monitoring workflows by letting you connect to various analytics, incident management, and internal messaging tools. This includes Slack, Datadog, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Splunk, NewRelic, and more. Read more
Jenkins: We’re bringing the API build closer to your API within the platform by integrating with Jenkins, the open source automation server. Read more

Search and discovery

Grouped search results: Search results are now grouped by workspaces, in Postman’s universal search, to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
New categories on the Postman API Network: We’ve introduced new categories on the Public API Network such as Artificial Intelligence, Communication, DevOps, and others to make it easier for you to find APIs relevant to your projects, start browsing now! Read more

Collaboration

Live view of who is visiting a workspace: When you are inside a public workspace, you can now see other Postman users who are also in the same workspace and and collaborate with them. Read more
Fork and pull requests for environments: You can now seamlessly collaborate on environments with the same ease you’ve come to expect from collections. Read more

Fork and pull requests for environment in Postman

Security and governance

Domain capture: By enabling domain capture, you can ensure that any user using your organization’s domain is automatically added to your organization’s Postman team. This feature is only available on the Enterprise plan. Read more
Super Admin role: A user with this role can manage anything and everything inside a team including but not limited to team settings, members, groups, and resources. This feature is only available on the Enterprise plan. Read more

Protocols

gRPC support: We now have first-class support for gRPC APIs; you can query, document (or use the automatically generated documentation), and share gRPC requests with your team directly in Postman! Read more

gRPC support in Postman

Automatic schema import for GraphQL: Postman can now detect when you’re querying a GraphQL endpoint and fetch the schema automatically. This allows you to use features such as autocomplete. Read more

…And more!

Uptime monitors: This new type of monitor allows you to continuously monitor the availability of public HTTP(s) domains without needing to create a collection first. Read more
Documentation generation from OpenAPI 3.0 definitions: To make collaboration on API design easier, Postman now automatically generates reference documentation from your OpenAPI 3.0 definitions. Read more
Importing HAR files: You can now import your HAR files directly into Postman and use the generated collections to visualize your requests, replay captured sessions, and easily examine your responses. Read more
Unresolved variables: Being able to easily identify and resolve variables that aren’t defined before sending your requests has been one of our top feature requests for a while. Well, this won’t happen anymore! You can now see and assign variables directly from a pop-up menu in the request builder. Read more

That’s it for now! We’ll see you again soon for another recap of what the teams at Postman have been working on and how the latest features can help you in your day-to-day work. Let us know in the comments below which of these features you prefer.

Want to learn more about Postman features? Check out these resources:

Release Notes page: for an extensive list of features released in the past
Postman Public Roadmap: for insights into upcoming releases
Postman issue tracker: for opening a new issue if you have any feature request—we’re always listening!

The post What’s New in Postman: 2022 H1 Releases appeared first on Postman Blog.

5 Ways an API Platform Boosts Productivity and Efficiency Across Your Org

Arlemi — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 16:44:37 +0000

(This article was originally written by Kin Lane)

API platforms are optimized for success across the API lifecycle. They’re hyper-focused on meeting the needs of consumers and other stakeholders, using well-traveled feedback loops that give consumers a voice in the roadmap for each API and allowing shorter cycles when it comes to delivering what consumers want.

Well-defined API platforms enable higher levels of velocity through a rapid succession of well-planned and fully tested releases that evolve APIs forward in safe, reliable, and communicated ways. And in cases where mistakes happen and problems do arise? The same mechanisms that enable quick responses to consumer needs and rapid releases allow for quick responses to incidents.

Ultimately, an effective API platform boosts productivity and efficiency across all microservices, APIs, and integrations that power an enterprise. Today’s organizations using an API platform that properly equips its teams are experiencing these five benefits:

1. Meeting customer needs

Feedback loops are essential to each individual API as well as to an overall API platform. General feedback loops around APIs gather what consumers need; more precise inline artifact-driven feedback loops enable feedback to come in on specific parts of each API. By optimizing feedback loops, consumer needs can be gathered in real time, aggregated, prioritized, and then potentially implemented in as short a period as possible. This reduces the cycles between when feedback is gathered and when a resource or capability can be moved forward, tested, and then delivered to consumers. Consumer needs are met faster and with higher quality to ensure that each incremental release meets the expectations of users putting it to work in their applications and integrations.

2. Achieving higher velocity

Teams who operate within known environments across well-defined API lifecycles are able to release more often. Design-first practices allow teams to rapidly design, mock, document, and verify that new capabilities will meet the expectations of consumers before any code is even written. This leads to the rapid design, development, testing, and delivery of incremental units of new value for API consumers to give them the capabilities they need. A sense of increased reliability ultimately helps build consumer confidence over time. The relationship between producer and consumer is strengthened as both move forward at higher speeds. With greater efficiency and quality control between API producer and consumer over multiple versions and releases, teams can confidently march forward in ways that focus on the perpetual generation of value between API consumer and producer.

3. Rolling forward consistently

API platforms allow developers to fail safely by empowering local development and deployment via tested, governed, and gated CI/CD pipelines. Modular contract, performance, governance, and other types of collection-defined testing incentivize continual forward motion that helps maximize releases while minimizing the need to roll back in response to failed deployments. Collection-based tests can be delivered as fine or coarse grain tests that developers can manually execute locally as they are developed. They can also be dropped into the CI/CD pipelines to ensure that every build meets the baseline of tests every time. With the ability to auto-generate tests for 100% of the surface area of an API using its OpenAPI, developers can ensure that their tests are covering the entire implementation. This keeps unintended breaking changes and flaws from getting through, ensuring every release is truly in service of forward motion and won’t need to be rolled back for any reason.

4. Recovering quickly

An API platform helps organizations meet consumers’ needs with higher rates of release velocity. That same process for efficiency can be applied to responding, resolving, communicating, reporting, and learning from incidents that do occur. When an API-first team is fully equipped, it’s ready to receive notifications and feedback about good or bad news, respond, design, mock, test, repeat, and then release to fix any problems and ensure user satisfaction. Teams operating in an API-first world are highly productive and efficient in moving API infrastructure forward but are also highly productive and efficient in fixing problems as they arise. API-first operations recover quickly from not-so-happy events that occur. An organization can effectively maintain trust with consumers.

5. Organizing and automating across domains

When done well, API platforms organize team productivity by domain: every slice of business operations is fully supported. The API lifecycle is translated into machine-readable units of value that can be automated to test and perpetually deploy the digital capabilities needed to move the enterprise forward. Collections allow essential API integrations and workflows to be defined, forked, shared, and made ubiquitous across operations. This provides self-contained documented examples of what works to power the API factory floor within an organization. By having repeatable API-driven workflows that can be used to produce and consume APIs in automated ways across an increasingly proven API lifecycle, organizations can rapidly move forward without being impeded by incidents that may arise along the way.

The post 5 Ways an API Platform Boosts Productivity and Efficiency Across Your Org appeared first on Postman Blog.

What Do DevOps and the NBA Have in Common?

Arlemi — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 19:42:25 +0000

(This article was originally written by Ruby Sattar)

With the NBA Finals having kicked off, basketball is on many people’s minds. As I was trying to figure out what qualifies teams to enter into the NBA playoffs earlier in the season, I realized that a ranking system like the one in DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is used. So, I started putting this blog post together to help me internalize DORA metrics as well.

If you’re unfamiliar with methods to measure the success of your team’s DevOps practices but have been spending late nights rooting for your favorite NBA team, don’t fret. Let’s look at some similarities between the DevOps world and the basketball world to make learning about DORA metrics easier—and hopefully more fun.

“Dora” is not just an adorable explorer embarking on bilingual adventures. In tech, DORA also represents the metrics that DevOps teams use to measure their own performance. Based on how teams fair with those metrics, they can be bucketed into categories labeled Elite, High, Medium, and Low (see below table sourced from a Google Cloud blog post):

Table showing how DORA measures DevOps performance

This information on the DORA breakdown is a valuable way to set benchmarks against which we can measure our own DevOps practices.

Let’s explore DORA and…the NBA playoffs

Did you know that NBA teams go through a “seeding” process to decide whether they make it to the playoffs? Seeding is a mechanism for ranking teams and is based on each team’s win-loss record throughout the regular playing season.

The traditional playoff tournament in North America consists of 16 total teams (eight teams in the Eastern Conference and eight in the Western Conference).

According to Jack Green, sports writer for the Betway Insider, “The team with the best record in each conference [Eastern and Western] receives the no. 1 seed [for their respective conference].” The no.1 seed is automatically entered into the playoff season along with 5 other highest ranking teams.

Teams that were ranked seven through ten, based on their win-loss record during the regular season, compete in a “play-in” tournament for a chance to be considered for the 7th and 8th seed pick, which would allow these teams to enter the traditional playoff tournament structure.

Here’s a visual example, provided by the NBA, showing where each “seed” is planted into a bracket system and how the play-in tournament contributes to the playoff tournament structure:

Despite the Miami Heat and the Phoenix Suns being top seeds in their respective conferences, neither team progressed to the final match-up this year. For the 2022 playoffs, the Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors are facing off for the championship.

DORA and the NBA seeding process are similar in a few ways, but I’ve summarized two key points below:

1. Both aim to Jimmy-bucket teams.

DORA helps determine whether a software development team can be considered Elite, High, Medium, or Low performing.
The NBA seeding process helps determine team placement in the playoff bracket system.

2. Both are data-driven processes.

To determine DORA scores, the following aspects are measured:

(DF) Deployment Frequency
(LT) Lead Time for Changes
(MTTR) Mean Time to Recovery
(CFR) Change Failure Rate

To determine NBA seeds, there are many factors that contribute to a team’s ability to win games, which ultimately informs their record and how they seed. Points, rebounds, and assists per game are among a few of these metrics.

In sum, DORA and the NBA playoffs really aren’t that different. They’re both just a structured way of determining how successful a team is at achieving specific goals.

Where does Postman fit in?

When considering how DORA scores are assessed, as developers, we have to wonder what processes, tools, and habits we can assume in order to inch closer to Elite status. The Postman API Platform offers a variety of capabilities to bolster higher scores in this regard, all while considering and accommodating developers’ experiences throughout the API development journey.

Postman is known for its testing and debugging prowess as well as its ability to be a key player in DevOps lifecycles. DORA Research Lead Dustin Smith, in his review of the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, considers an additional 5th metric for DORA: Reliability. Postman monitors address a number of use-cases related to reliability that impact this 5th metric. Newman, Postman’s command-line collection runner, is another tool that fits neatly into CI/CD pipelines which DevOps engineers are likely implementing in processes being measured for performance on DORA’s rubric.

Developer fun and games

Approaches to rating developer workflows can resemble systems we find in our everyday lives. The next time you track your favorite team’s rankings during intense tournaments, for example, you might find some interesting parallels to the tech space.

The post What Do DevOps and the NBA Have in Common? appeared first on Postman Blog.