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I’m looking today in a recent acquisition that shows the push toward more resilient APIs. Also this week, a recent round adds nuance to the market for substance abuse therapy startups. – Anna
Elastic APIs
Creating and distributing APIs may soon be easier: Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, is working on it.
“We’ve started by working on a problem that’s important to me, one that I’ve faced a lot myself as a developer, which is dramatically simplifying how developers are able to deliver APIs to end users,” its CEO Sagar Batchu told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller.
However, large companies with over 5,000 developers already struggle with API deployment, according to a survey supporting API platform Postman’s 2023 State of the API Report. Thirty-one percent of respondents at these large companies cited “managing too many APIs or microservices” as a barrier to producing APIs, compared to just 23% of all respondents.
It’s not hard to see how this revelation ties in with Postman’s recently announced acquisition and upcoming integration of API monitoring startup Akita Software. “The addition of Akita will make it easier than ever for users to manage their production APIs, even in the face of API proliferation,” reads its press release.
According to Akita founder Jean Yang, the rise of APIs has fundamentally changed the software development process. “More and more testing has gone into production. The intended behavior is now based on the observed behavior. Increasingly, the only way for teams to understand what is working is by inspecting production. We need new tools that meet developers where they are: not just for building the first draft of software, but for debugging, maintenance, and the nth draft,” she wrote in her announcement.
On a related note, chaos engineering may no longer be the sole domain of site reliability engineers.
