What’s With Postman’s New API Platform

Recently, Founder and CEO of Postman, Abhinav Asthana took to its blog to release an upgraded version of its API platforms.  

Latest Upgrade

Postman provides tools for the API lifecycle and collaborative capabilities for the team. Its latest version of the API platform combines the different tools and processes into one definitive. Founder and CTO Ankit Sobti shares the major six upgrades in his latest blog post: 

Deeper integration with version control systems

Version control systems have been one of Postman’s most popular integrations. It enables users to back their collection and synchronise their API schemas. Additionally, Postman’s customers use version control systems to store codes of their APIs. Realising that API constructs need to live with the code that powers a customer’s API, one can now integrate Git into Postman’s API management workflows. 

Source: Postman

Customers can define API versions, which allow parallel lines of development or deployment for an API, from within Postman. Additionally, customers get to select the version they want. Finally, they can link their Git repository with the API version -- linking the branches and tags from their repository with API versions in Postman, and keep the schemas and collections in sync and iterate on the API definition in Postman as they code in their repository. 

Source: Postman 

Customers can also pull any changes they make in their repository into Postman while keeping their collections and specs in sync at all times. Furthermore, Postman supports editing collections and specifications across all branches in a customer’s repositories, allowing them to use the Git workflow that they are comfortable with. Additionally, mock servers, monitors and documentation can be locked to specific releases, allowing customers to evolve their API versions without changing the documentation their consumers see. 

It allows the creation of multiple versions of one’s API to align with their strategies. In addition, the API lifecycle can be managed across versions as customers see fit -- support multiple consumers or stick to a stricter versioning system. Customers can also get an integrated API changelog so they can view changes to their API’s schema or underlying collections in one place. 

At present, Postman integrates with Bitbucket and GitHub. It plans to add support for GitLab and Azure DevOps as well. 

Private API Network 

Postman Private API Network allows producers to publish APIs created within Postman. The Private API Network further provides a central directory of all existing APIs, making them easily discoverable by authorised users.

Source: Postman 

Govern public APIs

Companies need visibility and be able to govern APIs that they expose publicly for external consumers. To enable enterprises to manage their collections made available for public consumption better, Postman has introduced the Community Manager role -- a feature that allows team members to view all public collection links created by members of their team in one place. Team members will also get to know who created individual links and allow them to delete the ones that should be public. 

API documentation and onboarding 

Postman API platform allows customers to link reference guides, recipes, how-to documents, and other communication means about the working of certain API with their APIs for a seamless onboarding experience.

Source: Postman

Integrated tooling 

To help customers avoid problems related to integrating the variety of tools used for building and managing their APIs, Postman integrated the following components into one:

• Source code management 
• CI/CD
• API gateways 
• Application Performance Management, or APM 

Source: Postman 

Postman is also adding support for Travis CI and Circle CI, and AWS API Gateway. 

Deployment control for Postman Enterprise plan 

Postman allows IT and system admins to deploy and control versions of the Postman app within their organisation with the help of the Postman Enterprise Application. Available as an MSI package for Windows, this application supports the silent installation, system-wide installation and additional configurations to control how and where Postman is installed on each device. It further integrates with Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Mobile Application Management (MMM) solutions. 

According to the blog post, the Postman Enterprise Application is available in private beta for all customers with the Postman Enterprise plan. 

Postman is deployed at organisations including PayPal, Cvent and Kroger.