Kong Inc. 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. Insomnia Designer is available now at
https://insomnia.rest/download or can
be downloaded by Kong Enterprise
customers as part of Kong Studio.
"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 Inc. "We are thrilled to share
Insomnia Designer with our community."
Insomnia
Designer: Wakes Up API Design for All Types of Application Interfaces
Unlike other API design tools that enforce one-size-fits-all processes,
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
Availability
Download open source Insomnia
Designer at: https://insomnia.rest/download