You’ve developed an amazing API product. Fantastic. But that’s just the beginning of your journey. Starting an API-first company brings with it a whole host of unique challenges for you to face along the way. Based on Moesif’s own experience of founding an API-first company, we’ve shared some insights below to help you avoid some of the pitfalls and make the most of the opportunities that lie before you. “API-first” can mean different things to different people.

Releasing high-quality products is crucial for developers and QA teams. At SmartBear, we’re always looking for ways to improve the software development lifecycle. We want to help developers and QA teams make the best use of their time before releasing products. Testing web or mobile applications ensures rich, robust functionality. With BitBar, your application works.

Postman is arguably a great collaboration platform for API management. Postman is an excellent tool for deconstructing RESTful APIs created by others or testing ones created by yourself. It provides a slick user interface for making HTML requests, eliminating the need to write a bunch of code to test an API’s functionality. Moreover, Postman is ideal for RESTful API tests. It is not a good design for SOAP APIs and other APIs.

Many API developers and companies struggle to find ways to easily set up systems to monetize their APIs. Some are simple but not customizable, some are complex and require massive engineering effort to actually get it all running. To make things easier, Moesif created a feature a few months ago called Billing Meters which gives massive customizability but with a minimal amount of code and engineering effort.

Swagger in conjunction with OpenAPI is a way for REST API’s to be build, documented and consumed. It is defined in either YAML or JSON. OpenAPI and Swagger are both open source, and their use is commonplace amongst development teams and can make the life of a performance tester a lot easier as it allows us to build JMeter tests directly from the definition of the endpoints. The object of this post is to look at how we can produce JMeter tests directly from a Swagger definition.

There are two types of tokens which can be generated when invoking the token endpoint in WSO2 API Manager. They are Opaque tokens and JWT tokens. You can easily create a service provider through the Management console and select which type of token you wish to generate using the service provider. What if you want the generated tokens to be in a customized format? In this article, we will look at how to create our own token issuer and generate customized tokens.

Ballerina is an open source programming language for the cloud that makes it easier to use, combine and create network services. In addition to the powerful language features, it comes with a rich standard library, which covers network data, messaging and communication protocols.

With ARM based dev machines and servers becoming more common, it is become increasingly important to build Docker images that support multiple architectures. This guide will show you how to build these Docker images on any machine of your choosing.

Learn what OpenAPI-driven contract testing is, how and when contract testing is performed and scaled for massive microservices programs, and how it can provide relief to development teams that have been overwhelmed by testing bottlenecks and increasing rates of code errors in production. The world runs on apps and platforms built from microservices – and microservices run on APIs.

In 2015 GraphQL was created by Facebook as an alternative to REST APIs to give more power to frontend developers by making API calls more flexible. GraphQL achieves this goal by providing its API consumers with a query language that allows them to query just the data they need. While GraphQL can improve frontend developer experience, its specification doesn’t have opinions on security.

Have you ever paid a bill for electricity, internet, or water? Was that bill based upon the amount of resources you used?

Developer experience. If you provide APIs or API-first products, you likely hear that term a lot. After all, you need developers for an API to succeed — and if they don’t have a great experience, they’ll move on.

In this blog, understand why your pod has OOMKilled errors when provisioning Kubernetes resources and how Speedscale can aid with automated testing. When creating production-level applications, enterprises want to ensure the high availability of services. This often results in a lengthy development process that requires extensive testing for the applications or a new release.

We’ve all heard the terms API product or API-as-a-product. The terms themselves seemed to be used quite freely, leaving some of us with an assumption of what is meant but without a really solid grasp. As joining and contributing to the API economy becomes more desirable, API products are a crucial part of any business that is looking to tap into it. So asking “what is an API product?” is a really relevant question with many different angles.

The past few years have accelerated the need for every business, irrespective of their industry of operation, to provide dynamic digital experiences. Consumers now demand digital experiences that are simple, seamless, personalized, always on, and (inherently) secure from every organization they do business with. During this journey towards digitalization, businesses have often realized that this process enables them to open themselves up towards new business opportunities and modern business models.

When we first launched Kong Konnect Cloud last year, we provided developers and API owners a powerful way to secure and manage their API products powered by the world’s fastest API gateway. Users flocked to Konnect to reduce their operational costs by using our hosted runtime manager, service catalog, developer portal and analytics platform.

We’ve heard it called a million and one different things. Sometimes it’s “selective synchronization”, sometimes it’s called “environments”. What is clear though, is that there’s a real need to be able to manage multiple sets of configuration for Kong Gateway through a single interface. Today, we’re happy to announce Runtime Groups for Kong Konnect. Runtime Groups allow you to manage your configurations independently.

As a result of the rapid growth in the number of applications and systems in the world, it has become arduous to create multiple user accounts and remember the credentials for each application. Addressing this concern, social login has become a widely adopted login option. Social login is a simple process where a user can select a social network as their identity provider.

The meteoric rise of Product-Led Growth, or PLG, has transformed business within the world of technology. One sector in particular has found incredibly fertile ground, that being, API-driven companies. This is in part because API-driven companies offer an easy-to-adopt platform that is highly customizable. Top product led growth companies Twilio and Stripe are often listed as the luminaries in the API space, because of their disruptive approach and their wildly high valuations.

Good API testing should give developers confidence that services will run and perform as expected in production. But how much contract testing vs. E2E functional testing is really needed for quality at speed? This blog was first published on September 9th, 2021. It has been updated with the most current information.

Asgardeo’s new Organization Branding feature is now available for you to try out. In this post, we will cover the problem that has been addressed by Asgardeo, and what this new feature has to offer.

APIs are basically pieces of code that help with task performance for the vast majority of businesses. An organization can accomplish data interoperability between various applications with the use of an API analytics tool. If you're a part of the API economy and want to start using APIs as a source of revenue or growth in today's hyper-connected world, you need to manage APIs with more finesse.

Web APIs are an integral piece of the development landscape today. According to a 2021 survey, top industries such as Digital Banking, Retail, and Financial services have experienced significant year-on-year API traffic growth with 70%, 51% and 50% increases since February 2021, respectively. The economic impact of APIs is significant and vast. Recent funding rounds of API-focused companies have seen millions of dollars go to companies precisely because APIs appeal to developers.

Today’s digital economy is shifting toward dependence on microservices — self-contained and reusable software components — working in coordination to compose the applications we use. Communication between microservices happens through the API (or application programming interface). Using APIs (which are like pieces of software that let applications communicate with each other) is how microservices expose their functionalities and allow access to their services and their data.

One of the most common use cases our customers are using Kong for is rate limiting. There are a few common reasons for doing this: For all those and more, we’re able to easily add this functionality with Kong’s rate limit advanced plugin. The plugin can be applied at different levels such as service, route, specific consumer, or even in a global scope.

Nate Lee here, and I’m one of the founders of Speedscale. The founding team’s worked at several observability and testing companies like New Relic, Observe Inc, and iTKO over the last decade. Speedscale traffic replay was borne out of a frustration from reacting to problems (even if they were minor) that could have been prevented with better testing.

There’s a common misconception that product-led growth means a business doesn’t focus on sales. That’s not the case. It’s just that product-led growth layers in sales later in the customer journey. This can be a hugely effective approach, particularly when it’s combined with deep data insights to drive that growth. For API-first companies, this product-led approach is a cornerstone of success.

Open banking initiatives have taken flight in many economies across the globe. Predicated on the open access of banking data for the overall benefit of customer choice, open banking comes with many challenges — security not the least of them. Giving customers the ability to easily switch providers of financial products goes a long way towards providing a more open and inclusive landscape of products for customers to choose from, and delivering better customer experiences.