A global survey of 5,600 developers finds nearly two-thirds can now produce an application programming interface (API) in less than a week but only a third (33%) can deploy an API in less than a week.
Conducted by Postman, a provider of a platform for designing APIs, the survey also finds that 56% of respondents are producing APIs that will only be deployed internally, compared to 26% creating APIs for partners and 18% working on public APIs.
Overall, the survey finds nearly half of respondents (48%) said their organization will be ramping up investments in APIs in the coming year.
Additionally, 62% of respondents said they work with APIs that generate income, with 21% noting APIs help drive more than 75% of revenue.
Postman CTO Ankit Sobti said that is likely to continue as more organizations rely on APIs to integrate multiple generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms into business processes.
Not surprisingly, Open AI drives the most API traffic involving AI (54%), followed by GitHub Copilot (35%) and Microsoft Copilot (25%). However, only 43% said they plan to use OpenAI next year, so it is already clear developers are keeping their options open in an era where advances continue to be made at a fast and furious rate.
The primary challenges when using these APIs, as always, are validating security and compliance (31%); evaluating and testing large language models (LLMs), agents and prompts (25%); onboarding and knowledge sharing (24%); discovering relevant APIs (22%); and managing and exposing APIs (21%), the survey finds.
In general, 48% of respondents say API creation is owned by the development team, but an equal percentage noted that a central team oversees API strategy and governance. However, only 37% said they are testing API security and fewer (27%) do not use API key vault security tools. Just as concerning, only 45% are conducting performance tests.
Even fewer (34%) are testing the APIs used in the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments. The most widely used DevOps tools and platforms used by respondents are GitHub Actions (41%), followed by Docker (31%), Jenkins (28%), Azure Pipelines (23%) and GitLab CI (19%). The most widely used tools for managing application performance are Grafana (32%), Elastic (25%) and Datadog (23%).
The survey makes it clear organizations have never been more dependent on APIs, said Sobti. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) described their organization as being API first, in the sense they prioritize design, integration and team efficiency. Just under a third are using multiple API gateways with the most widely used being the API Gateway from Amazon Web Services (46%) and the Azure API Management Gateway (27%).
There is a lot of diversity when it comes to the tools being used to both publish and consume APIs. The challenge is that not all APIs are of equal value. DevOps teams need to be able to identify the APIs that have the greatest value to the business. Otherwise, they will find themselves trying to manage thousands of APIs that were in many cases created, and sometimes later abandoned, for no reason other than someone at some point thought it might be a good idea to have one.