Nearly 50% of cos to boost investment in APIs over the next year: Postman

Application program interfaces (APIs) have played a key role in the digital transformation of 84.5% of companies, a study conducted by San Francisco, California-based API development platform Postman said.

Dubbed 2020 State of the API Report, the company surveyed 13,586 API developers, testers and executives for the study. 

Nearly 50% of those surveyed said that they would increase their investment, in terms of both time and resources, into APIs over the next 12 months, while about a third stated that APIs played a role in their ability to respond to the pandemic.

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“Our annual survey reveals that the API ecosystem is expanding, investments are flowing and momentum for an API-first philosophy is being embraced more and more,” Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman, said.

At 48.7%, microservices is the future API-related technology that most respondents were excited about, followed by Kubernetes at 43.6% and containers at 42.2%.

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In terms of challenges, 52.3% felt that lack of time was the number one obstacle while implementing APIs, while 54.3% cited lack of documentation in terms of consuming APIs.

“After a full review of the data, we found that more than 7 in 10 respondents said the most important factors they considered before integrating with APIs were reliability (71.6%), security (71%), performance (70.9%) and documentation (70.3%),” Postman chief evangelist Kin Lane.

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In order to mitigate the challenges, respondents felt that they need to increase the time spent on designing APIs from 8.7% to 11%, automate testing APIs from 11% to 15%, while lower the debugging time from 17% to 10%.