Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

For those who aren’t familiar with Insomnia, it’s Kong’s API testing, design and debugging platform. Insomnia’s product vision is to optimize API development by simplifying and automating a developer’s workflows. APIOps plays a key role in this vision, optimizing API development by simplifying and automating developers’ workflows.

Over the past two decades REST APIs have emerged as a lightweight and flexible standard for enterprise data and backends get exposed to external, partner, and internal applications. Google Cloud’s Apigee is a leader in API Management, allowing users to manage REST APIs — define rate limits, enforce authentication and authorization, block clients that attempt to misuse an API, and ensure APIs work seamlessly as they are updated.

IT automation is an essential business best practice that has enabled countless organizations to become more efficient. According to a survey by Salesforce, 95 percent of executives and directors see the value of automation, and 88 percent want to pursue automation as a key investment for their business. This general tenet holds for the specific case of API automation as well. APIs are a highly underrated, yet critical, technology that underpins the modern digital ecosystem.

An API is a process where one application, website, or software can talk to another and provides a way for the developers of one application to interact with the components of another application. The goal is to make it easier for people who are working on different projects at the same time to work together seamlessly. There are various reasons that an API may be needed. We can see many companies using APIs in their software development processes, such as Slack, Google Docs, Facebook, and Gmail.

Joining us is Phil Nash, leading developer evangelist at Twilio, a Google Developer Expert and a member of the Live Coders team on Twitch. He’s a regular conference speaker where he sometimes writes code on stage and hopes everything just works.

What I see too often though is folks running multiple UI tests in an attempt to validate specific output values or logic. A much easier way to accomplish this task is to run specific API tests on the business logic of the software. Why should we do this? It’s much faster and easier to write these tests. We can have our developers supporting this process and not just Selenium or automation experts. 'Work smarter, not harder' is a theory we should all be familiar with.

Many current web applications rely on near-frictionless and simultaneous access to numerous API providers' Web APIs. However, the web's default is to prohibit such "loose" behaviour, much like a firewall that blocks access to untrusted parties in the name of security. That default, thankfully, can be safely altered. Before doing so, however, it is necessary for both Web application developers and API providers to understand the concepts of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).

In this episode of Kongcast, I spoke with Chinmay Gaikwad, the tech evangelist at Epsagon, about distributed tracing and observability for microservices architectures. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below, and be sure to subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes.