Belong keeps its architecture in order with Postman
Belong is one of India’s fastest growing companies and helps organizations discover, engage, and hire top talent with their data-driven solution through personalized interactions. They’ve helped some of India’s highest performing companies such as Snapdeal, Xiaomi, and Helpchat hire. Growing meteorically fast, they needed to move away from a monolithic architecture to an API based one using 25 microservices. With 70 employees working on the codebase, APIs are critical to Belong’s business.
In their microservice architecture, Belong has one platform and 25 products/services. All the communications between these products and the platform are made through APIs. With the high number of APIs and the volume of usage, they needed a tool that helped them develop, maintain and test APIs efficiently. They started with Django’s REST interface, Chrome dev tools and some other clients.
According to Cofounder, Veer Saiteja,
“Using so many microservices for our product makes things challenging from a collaboration and testing perspective. We were spending 30% of our time on just tests! Also, with the so many microservices detailing sub-products in our ecosystem, one change affects many people and we had to constantly communicate it out.”
As a result a lot of developer time was wasted.
Transitioning to Postman
Saiteja says, “One of the beauties of Postman is the low friction of getting started.The minute I found the Chrome packaged app I downloaded it, tested some requests and created a collection. The minute I did that, it was obvious I should share the collection with my team and that’s when we got started with Postman Cloud.”
Postman Cloud now manages Belong’s API documentation, auto updates team members on API changes and serves as the testing suite. The APIs are always under constant development and new endpoints are added all the time but there is no communication overhead anymore. Everyone gets the latest version of the API instantaneously.
The Postman Collections act as the source of truth for their API infrastructure internally and externally. They have no need to maintain the two separately anymore. Because the team members test requests within the product, they save time not changing context.
Tests are now defined within Postman. The tests check the API’s output to make sure it is in the expected schema. So every time they build something new or update some product, they know if the API is behaving as expected.
Smooth operations in the Cloud
“Postman has reduced time spent testing by 50% freeing up our developers to work on mission critical stuff. That is a huge win for us!”
Because of Postman, Belong’s teams touching the API are always up to date. Being a high growth startup, Belong has also benefitted when onboarding new employees. Because of the one-stop-shop documentation and testing within collections, new hires ramp up much faster and Belong is revolutionizing hiring, inside and out.
“Postman impressed us with its ease of use, effectiveness and developer centric approach. The Cloud product is perfect for teams that want to smoothen communication, collaboration and automate. It’s the no-brainer product.”
