Introducing the New Private API Network for Easier Discovery
This post is co-authored by Postman Engineering Manager Avinash Choudhary and Postman Product Manager John Kilgore.
Private APIs can provide incredible benefits for organizations. They expose an organization’s existing capabilities for reuse by internal teams, and they can significantly reduce the time and resources needed to develop new features.
However, organizations can only reap these benefits if developers know about their private APIs. Sounds obvious, right? But with the number of private APIs within organizations increasing, it becomes extremely difficult for consumers to find the API they are looking for. Scanning through Slack archives, looking for that one Confluence page, or pinging the right person are often the only options available to developers trying to discover existing private APIs. This friction when trying to find the right API doesn’t just hamper productivity, it can cause teams who are unable to find an existing resource to waste time and resources by building duplicate functionalities.
In order to address these pain points, Postman’s all-new Private API Network now helps developers discover relevant private APIs faster. The Private API Network provides a central directory of all internal APIs in your organization, so your teams can check what’s available before engineering their own solutions.
Let’s look at six key features of the all-new Private API Network that help make discovering private APIs easier:
1. Folder organization
To further enhance API discovery, you can organize APIs in your Private API Network into multi-level folders. To explain what APIs within a folder are all about, you can also add markdown-supported descriptions to folders.
2. API Overview page
The all-new API Overview page provides all the relevant information about an API to enable consumers to make a decision on using an API. The API Overview page also provides information on who published the API, who the editors of the API are, and who consumers can reach out to through comments in Postman.
3. API versions
Only the versions of your API that are intended for use by consumers are visible on the Private API Network. Consumers can see a quick overview about the API version and check out API documentation and schema within the Private API Network.
4. Easy filtering
You can filter APIs in your Private API Network by multiple attributes—such as name, summary, and schema type—to quickly discover APIs.
5. API landscape governance
Private API Network reports make it easier to govern your internal API landscape by providing insights into the APIs in your Private API Network.
6. GitHub import
You can make all your existing APIs that are lost in GitHub discoverable on the Private API Network in one click when you import from GitHub.
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