DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced the release of a new open source tool called Insomnia Designer.

Building on Insomnia Core, which Kong acquired in 2019, Insomnia Designer provides a collaborative API design editor that makes it easier for developers and DevOps teams to create and edit API specifications. The software works natively with Insomnia's testing capabilities to accelerate the development, performance and stability of REST and GraphQL services, the communications backbone of the modern applications and services people rely on each day.

"With Insomnia Designer, we're building on Insomnia's open source foundation to provide a single, collaborative workflow for teams to design APIs," said Greg Schier, Tech Lead at Kong Inc. and creator of Insomnia. "Insomnia is the most popular open source tool for exploring and debugging GraphQL and REST APIs, and we're looking to have Insomnia Designer follow the same principles."

The need for stable, high-performing APIs has never been greater. With digital transformation initiatives in full swing at companies of all sizes and industries, applications are becoming increasingly distributed. Market research shows that the vast majority of companies (84 percent) are already using microservices, and a growing number have moved entirely to distributed architectures. Functioning as the nerve endings connecting decentralized applications and systems, APIs enable and govern how microservices communicate and exchange information. Insomnia Designer makes it simple to design APIs and use them across different repositories.

"In the new era of API-driven applications and architectures, the importance of clean and extensible API design is essential to enable both API consumption and API innovation, and it has long been our goal at Kong to provide open source tools for designing APIs and microservices at scale," said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong.

Insomnia Designer brings a spec-first development approach that allows users to create workflows that mirror the way their teams communicate to foster better collaboration. The new Insomnia Designer empowers developers to more easily design REST and GraphQL APIs by using Git repository as a single source of truth. By enabling GitOps best practices, Insomnia Designer facilitates collaboration, increases release velocity, and allows developers to track changes from multiple people and ensure code is up to standards through pull request reviews.

To expand on the GitOps capabilities offered within Insomnia Designer, Kong is also releasing plugins that enable Insomnia Designer users to automatically embed Kong Gateway policies directly into their API specification files. In line with GitOps best practices, this allows all configurations for the Kong Gateway and API to be stored in the same Git repository. Within the Insomnia Designer UI, users can select Kong Plugins for capabilities such as authentication or rate-limiting to govern their API's behavior, and input it directly into their code.

Key features include:

- Provides a single, collaborative space for developer teams to browse, explore and collaborate on API specs for both REST and GraphQL endpoints

- Automatically generates configurations for both Kubernetes and Kong for Kubernetes within the individual API spec file

- Allows users to easily search for API design and view critical details, including Git Status, Git Branch and more via the Insomnia Document Listing

- Increases the automation of developer workflows via plugin integrations with Kong Gateway and the Kong Enterprise platform

- Includes all features in Insomnia Core within an UI/UX optimized for API design workflows