Postman makes artificial intelligence tool available for API management platform

Postman today made available a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool for its platform for creating and managing application programming interfaces (APIs) that automatically creates tests and documentation.

Announced at POST/CON 2024, Postbot is part of version 11 of the Postman platform, which also adds workspaces that make it easier for software development teams to work together.

According to Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana, the overall goal is to improve the quality of APIs being developed while reducing the friction involved in developing and updating APIs.

Developers are already actively using artificial intelligence tools to write code, but Postman uses a combination of Open Language Models (LLMs) and LLMs from Open AI and Microsoft to automatically create tests and documentation based on data collected by the platform. In addition to making it easier to create API tests using a conversational interface, the overall quality of those tests is improved by using LLMs specifically trained on Postman's data, Asthana said.

Developers need to rely on artificial intelligence tools

This is very important because the ratio between developers and the number of services providing APIs is too high, says Asthana. Developers will have to rely more on artificial intelligence tools to create and manage APIs as the number of services they have to manage keeps growing.

It's not always clear who in organizations manages APIs. Developers undoubtedly create APIs, but API management may fall to the DevOps team. As more organizations adopt platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale, it is increasingly likely that API management will be centralized.

Ultimately, the rise of microservices-based applications has dramatically increased the number of APIs that need to be managed. APIs play a critical role in making data externally available to other applications. However, the bulk of APIs created today are designed to integrate all of the microservices that make up the environment of a modern application. The number of these predominantly internal APIs is growing at such a rate that it is becoming difficult for individual developers to manage them at scale. As a result, many organizations face a serious API change management challenge, Asthana notes.

Every organization needs to determine the extent to which microservice management is sustainable. Instead of getting bogged down in philosophical debates, many organizations are deploying a mix of microservices alongside monolithic applications that also provide APIs. In essence, monolithic applications become large microservices. Regardless of the approach, the number of APIs, including illegal and zombie APIs that organizations either didn't know they created or simply forgot about, is dizzying. In many ways, APIs in the absence of a governance framework quickly become too much of a good thing.

There are many ways to manage APIs, but it is important to remember that the chosen approach should integrate well with the tools used to create those APIs.