API investments remain strong despite tough times

Around half of respondents to a new survey say that investment of time and resources into APIs will increase over the next 12 months, while another third think investments into APIs will stay the same, despite a tough economic environment.

The study from development collaboration platform Postman shows over 60 percent of survey respondents rate themselves as five out of 10 or better in terms of embracing an 'API-first' philosophy.

The API industry also continues to touch just about every job role, from developers to management to sales, even up to the C-suite. In fact, a tenth of those working with APIs today are in management roles -- from the C-suite through to directors and managers.

"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," says Abhinav Asthana, Postman's co-founder and CEO. "The data also shows us the importance of APIs and their role in responding to sudden and tectonic shifts in the way businesses, governments, and non-profits operate, including pandemics."

Lack of time (52.3 percent) is cited as the number one obstacle to producing APIs, while lack of documentation (54.3 percent) is the number one obstacle to consuming them. Respondents feel they should spend more time designing (11 percent of their time, in an ideal world) and automating testing (15 percent) for APIs, and less time debugging (10 percent) than they actually experience. In real life only 8.7 percent of time is spent designing APIs and 11 percent of time is spent automating testing, while 17 percent of time is spent debugging.

Microservices (48.7 percent) is the future technology respondents are most excited about, followed by Kubernetes (43.6 percent) and containers (42.2 percent).

The full report is available from the Postman site.

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