The State of API 2017
September 28, 2017

Joyce Lin
Postman

API use is exploding among developers, as APIs are an essential part of software development for the web, IoT, mobile and AI applications. APIs allow a developer to create programs or apps that can successfully request services or data from other applications or operating system. This connectivity, though powerful, is complex, and that complexity grows with new apps, new hardware such as the new iPhone and Echo, and the creation of new APIs.

The 2017 State of API Survey, conducted by Postman, revealed the following:

Developers work with APIs a lot

■ 70 percent of the community spends more than a quarter of their week working with APIs.

Public APIs are important, but private and internal APIs dominate most development work

■ Developers spend 20 percent of their time on Public APIs, 18 percent on 3rd party private APIs and 62 percent on internal private APIs.

■ 61 percent of developers spend 90+ percent of their time with private/internal APIs.

API documentation is critical and could be better

■ The community had numerous concrete suggestions for how to improve documentation, including standardization (58 percent), better examples and real-world use cases (55 percent).

The developer community wants more tools

■ 80 percent of respondents identifying at least 2 tools as essential to their workflow.

APIs and microservices go hand-in-hand

■ Microservices are the most interesting technology identified by the community for 2017 — 27 percent of developers are interested in microservices.

■ Developers are most excited to utilize microservices in 2017. More than one-fourth of the respondents said this — one and a half times the interest of any other answer.

"These numbers are interesting and, as with any survey in a fast-developing area, they allow us to see the rise of microservices as enablers and backend for APIs," said Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst and VP of Constellation Research. "It’s no surprise that developers would like to see better documentation of APIs but at the same time often are less motivated to document them. Whomever breaks that paradox will create an important milestone in the journey to the API economy."

Joyce Lin is a Developer Evangelist for Postman
Share this

Industry News

February 13, 2025

LaunchDarkly announced the private preview of Warehouse Native Experimentation, its Snowflake Native App, to offer Data Warehouse Native Experimentation.

February 13, 2025

SingleStore announced the launch of SingleStore Flow, a no-code solution designed to greatly simplify data migration and Change Data Capture (CDC).

February 13, 2025

ActiveState launched its Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaas) offering to help organizations manage open source and accelerate secure software delivery.

February 12, 2025

Genkit for Node.js is now at version 1.0 and ready for production use.

February 12, 2025

JFrog signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

February 12, 2025

mabl launched of two new innovations, mabl Tools for Playwright and mabl GenAI Test Creation, expanding testing capabilities beyond the bounds of traditional QA teams.

February 11, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced a strategic partnership with leading cloud security provider Wiz to address the growing challenges enterprises face securing hybrid cloud environments.

February 11, 2025

Jitterbit announced its latest AI-infused capabilities within the Harmony platform, advancing AI from low-code development to natural language processing (NLP).

February 11, 2025

Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) and Sequoia Holdings announced a strategic partnership to enhance software supply chain security, classified workload deployments, and Kubernetes management for the Department of Defense (DOD), Intelligence Community (IC), and federal civilian agencies.

February 10, 2025

Harness and Traceable have entered into a definitive merger agreement, creating an advanced AI-native DevSecOps platform.

February 10, 2025

Endor Labs announced a partnership with GitHub that makes it easier than ever for application security teams and developers to accurately identify and remediate the most serious security vulnerabilities—all without leaving GitHub.

February 07, 2025

Are you using OpenTelemetry? Are you planning to use it? Click here to take the OpenTelemetry survey(link is external).

February 06, 2025

GitHub announced a wave of new features and enhancements to GitHub Copilot to streamline coding tasks based on an organization’s specific ways of working.

February 06, 2025

Mirantis launched k0rdent, an open-source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME) that provides a single control point for cloud native applications – on-premises, on public clouds, at the edge – on any infrastructure, anywhere.

February 06, 2025

Hitachi Vantara announced a new co-engineered solution with Cisco designed for Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.