December 2020 Summaries

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Bifrost is a rainbow bridge enabling instant travel between realms, and similarly, Postman's Bifrost websocket gateway allows for seamless connections between Postman clients and services. This system emerged from the need to address inefficiencies in Postman's Sync service, which had become a monolithic bottleneck due to its extensive responsibilities, including managing websocket connections and database transactions. The Server Foundation team, responsible for creating shared utilities, spearheaded the development of Bifrost, which was achieved by decoupling websocket handling from Sync, thus enhancing system efficiency and scalability. Bifrost is composed of a public gateway and a private API, utilizing technologies like Fastify and Amazon AWS ElastiCache for Redis to optimize performance. The migration to Bifrost involved careful planning and testing, allowing Postman to manage increasing user loads and new collaborative features without requiring client-side updates. Despite its success, the journey continues as Postman aims to build additional redundancy, increase bandwidth, and further dismantle the Sync monolith, enhancing their engineering processes and capabilities.

In 2020, Postman focused on enhancing user experience and community engagement, introducing numerous updates and features, including a web version of their platform and joining the OpenAPI Initiative to promote API standards. The company launched public workspaces to facilitate broader API collaboration and partnered with AsyncAPI to advance message-driven APIs. The community's active participation was highlighted, with record engagement on the Postman forum and a successful guest blogger program promoting diverse voices in the API industry. Postman also expanded educational initiatives for students and educators, and conducted webinars and livestreams to share insights and knowledge. The year concluded with anticipation for Postman Galaxy, a virtual API conference featuring prominent speakers like Steve Wozniak and Dr. Ellen Ochoa, aimed at furthering community interaction and learning.

Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system, is explored in a detailed tutorial using Postman Collections to deploy an application on an AWS-hosted Kubernetes cluster. This hands-on guide is designed for beginners, covering prerequisites like creating an AWS account, installing necessary tools such as AWS CLI, eksctl, and kubectl, and setting up a Kubernetes cluster on AWS EKS. The tutorial explains containerization basics and highlights Kubernetes' advantages in managing containers, such as scaling services and performing health checks. Users learn to access the Kubernetes API from Postman by creating service accounts and cluster roles, and to deploy an app using Kubernetes objects like pods and services. The process involves creating a pod for the app 'Dobby', managing deployments with readiness and liveness probes, and exposing services via LoadBalancer for external access. The tutorial concludes with cleanup instructions and encourages further exploration of Kubernetes objects, workflow automation in Postman, and deployment automation in CI/CD environments.

Livestreaming, initially popularized by gaming, has seen a surge in science and technology content, with influencers like Postman's developer relations team leveraging the medium to replace traditional meetups and engage with communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team launched their Twitch channel in early 2020, hosting 47 streams totaling over 66 hours, featuring a range of topics from COVID-19 data visualization to API-related workshops. This initiative was propelled by the need to adapt to the constraints of the pandemic, leading to diverse content and guest participation, which included notable figures from companies like GitHub, Dropbox, and Twitter. As they conclude their inaugural season, they reflect on lessons learned, such as the ease of unintentional disclosures during live sessions and the inevitable debates that arise, while looking forward to new interactions and continued growth in 2021.

In the 2020 edition of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Postman participated by developing a project called postman-code-generators, which aims to generate software development kits (SDKs) from Postman Collections, enhancing the ability to integrate APIs into client code. This initiative expands on Postman's existing functionality of generating code snippets for API requests by creating a client SDK that is immediately usable in existing code, particularly beneficial for APIs lacking pre-existing SDKs. Spearheaded by student developer Somesh Koli, the project retained the folder structure and request names from the original Postman Collection, incorporated support for popular authorization schemes like Basic Auth and Bearer Token, and utilized collection and environment variables as configurable variables within the SDK. While the initial iteration supports only NodeJS, the project is open to feedback and future expansion into additional programming languages. Demonstrations using the Travefy API illustrate how the SDK maintains Postman's functionality, offering features like JSDoc-compatible annotations for autocomplete and inline help, and variable management capabilities.

Postman has evolved from simplifying API calls through its interface to introducing features like Postman Collections and Workspaces, which enhance collaboration and streamline API development. Initially, Postman focused on making API calls successful by eliminating the need for complex command-line knowledge, which led to the creation of Postman Collections that encapsulate necessary API call elements. This initiative facilitated sharing among teams and the broader community, laying the groundwork for Postman Workspaces that enable collaboration and improve API development lifecycle efficiency. Recognizing the need for broader collaboration, Postman introduced Public Workspaces, which allow anyone to access and interact with API artifacts, fostering a global collaborative environment. These workspaces encourage interaction through features like commenting, forking, and pull requests, and they simplify API lifecycle management with tools like the API Builder and a robust search engine. This development aims to redefine public collaboration in API development, making Postman a central hub for API producers and consumers worldwide, with the potential to transform how public APIs are built and used.

Postman has partnered with AsyncAPI to bolster the development and standardization of message-driven APIs by providing resources and support to the AsyncAPI team, enabling them to evolve their specification and open-source tools. This collaboration builds on Postman's previous involvement with the OpenAPI Initiative, as AsyncAPI serves as a complementary specification for describing APIs that do not use HTTP, such as TCP, MQTT, and AMQP. The partnership aims to enhance Postman's platform by incorporating asynchronous APIs, which have been highly requested by the community, while ensuring that AsyncAPI maintains open governance and reflects community needs. This alliance allows Postman to expand its API support beyond REST, SOAP, and GraphQL, embracing emerging event-driven protocols and enriching the API development toolbox for organizations. The AsyncAPI team, led by Fran Méndez and Lukasz Gornicki, is working towards placing the specification into a foundation to secure its future development, while Postman benefits from AsyncAPI's expertise to further support diverse API patterns and protocols.

Postman for the web has introduced significant updates that enhance usability by allowing users to access it directly from their browsers, featuring a revamped interface with new tabs, universal search, and improved navigation. The platform now includes a Home page with quick links for creating or importing entities, exploring the API Network, managing teams, and viewing activity feeds. Each workspace has its own Overview page to streamline access and collaboration. Users can now manage environments, mocks, and monitors through dedicated tabs, making it easier to edit and view these elements. The addition of a context bar provides entity-specific actions and information, while the universal search function allows for efficient searching across all workspaces and collections. Furthermore, Postman for the web enables users to generate links for various elements, facilitating easy sharing and collaboration. These updates aim to make Postman more accessible and user-friendly.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc. and renowned tech innovator, will be a featured speaker at Postman Galaxy, a virtual API conference scheduled for February 2-4, 2021. Known for his crucial role in founding Apple alongside Steve Jobs in 1976 with the development of the Apple I personal computer, Wozniak continues to be a celebrated figure in the technology and philanthropy sectors. Postman Galaxy attendees will have the opportunity to hear Wozniak in a live fireside chat, where he may discuss his experiences at Apple, share predictions for the future of technology, or offer his thoughts on achieving happiness. His appearance promises to deliver engaging and insightful commentary for the global API community and is expected to be a memorable highlight of the event.