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Today I’m looking in a recent acquisition that shows the trend towards more resilient APIs. Also this week, a recent round that adds nuance to the addiction treatment startup market. — Anne
Resilient APIs
Building and distributing APIs may soon be easier: Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, is working on it.
“We started by working on a problem that was important to me, a problem that I have faced a lot myself as a developer, which greatly simplifies the way developers can send APIs to end users,” its CEO Sagar Batchu told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller.
However, large enterprises with more than 5,000 developers are already grappling with API proliferation, according to a survey supporting Postman’s API platform. API Status Report 2023. Thirty-one percent of respondents at these large enterprises 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 finding connects to Postman’s recently announced acquisition and upcoming integration of API observability startup Akita Software. “Adding Akita will make it easier than ever for users to manage their production APIs, even in the face of API proliferation,” its press release reads.
According to Akita founder Jean Yang, the rise of APIs has fundamentally changed the software development process. “More and more tests are being passed to production. Intended behavior is now based on observed behavior. Increasingly, the only way for teams to understand what works is to inspect production. We need new tools that meet developers where they are: not just for creating the first version of software, but for debugging, maintenance and the nth version,” she wrote in her announcement.
On a related note, chaos engineering might no longer be the exclusive domain of site reliability engineers.