Build Reuse into Your API Program with Konnect Dev Portal
The new Kong Konnect Dev Portal is now generally available for all users!
In March, we announced the public beta version of our reimagined Dev Portal. We set out to fully address the needs of the modern API consumer as well as the needs of the modern enterprise in promoting API adoption and reuse throughout the organization.
We are excited to announce that the GA version is now available for users! With this release and the GA of Service Catalog, we are introducing a new API discovery experience that prioritizes both sides of API discovery. Read more about our unified API discovery experience in this blog.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to operationalize API reuse across teams by effectively surfacing APIs for application consumption in the Dev Portal.
Why should you care about API reuse?
When we refer to API reuse, we’re mostly talking about an API program/strategy that prioritizes reusing existing APIs rather than building new ones. Often, larger organizations lack the means to easily discover and access existing APIs resulting in developers wasting resources searching for APIs and even creating redundant APIs. Long term, this results in API bloat and sprawl and becomes a governance nightmare.
That time and energy spent searching and building is a cost, and it’s one that can snowball dramatically over time. By standing up an API reuse strategy through a developer portal, your organization can improve developer productivity and drive cost savings. Beyond these direct and easily quantifiable benefits, you’ll also strengthen your organization’s ability to adapt to shifting trends, customer needs, and emerging technologies by curating a lean and accessible API program.
How to get started
1. Build a well-branded and modern home for your APIs
The Konnect Dev Portal is designed to help your developers quickly stand up a highly customized portal. We offer a starter template for teams who want to quickly launch a functional, branded portal. Further customization is easy as the portal leverages pre-built Markdown components (MDC) that you can learn about in the Portal Docs. To help keep portals maintainable and follow principles like DRY (don’t repeat yourself), we’ve added a feature called Snippets that essentially allows you to create custom Markdown components and use that component across multiple pages in a portal.
For advanced customization use cases, the portal also supports custom CSS to ensure every aspect of your portal aligns to your requirements and branding guidelines.
Step 1.5. Build better APIs with AI
If you're designing or maintaining APIs, you can try our new dev tool for building OpenAPI specs with AI. It’s built on top of the open-source spec renderer used in the Dev Portal, Service Catalog, Insomnia, and Admin API docs.
Generate high-quality specs in seconds, preview them in a clean UI, and share them instantly with teammates, no login required. Iterate fast and export when ready. Try it now at create-api.dev, and read more about it here. We’d love to hear how it fits into your API workflow.
Step 2. Drive API adoption with a top-notch portal Developer Experience (DevEx)
The hard truth is you can build a portal for your developers, but if the experience of it isn’t up to par, no one will use it. To get the most out of your portals (i.e. drive API adoption and reuse), you first need to drive portal adoption. The new Konnect Dev Portal was designed with this exact challenge in mind – your developers, both as API providers and API consumers – can easily navigate a frictionless API publishing and discovery experience.
API publishers can publish well-documented APIs with our streamlined publishing flow. They simply have to upload a spec file, select a portal(s) to publish to, and select the visibility and authentication settings for publishing. With the Kong-engineered open-source spec renderer (that supports both OpenAPI and AsyncAPI specs), API publishers can immediately surface their APIs to the desired portal(s) with modern and easy-to-understand API reference.
API consumers can then head into the internal portal and browse or search for the APIs they need to consume to build their apps. With the ability to search the entire portal and filter the portal by custom attributes, developers can easily discover their desired API, understand its functionality, test it out directly in the UI, and register their app to consume it – faster. Reducing friction at every point of this discovery process makes it all the more likely that a developer will find and adopt the API they need, ultimately driving API adoption and reuse.
Step 3. Access and assess API usage metrics to identify high-impact APIs
Once you’ve successfully set up your portal, Konnect Dev Portal will collect metrics on consumption details across your published APIs. You can view these metrics in charts showcased in each portal’s dashboard in Konnect, and if you want to explore in more granular detail, you can click the desired chart and be directed to the Konnect Analytics Explorer view with the chart’s data and context preserved. In Analytics, you can explore the API metrics by other dimensions such as Number of Requests, Error Rate and Average Latency. Developers creating Applications will also be able to take advantage of these metrics when using generated credentials.
Through Analytics, you can analyze and compare the request count and throughput of specific APIs, applications, consumers, control planes, and more. Because Analytics supports a 14 month retention period, you can analyze historical data to help you identify API consumption patterns by different consumers. Refine your API program with these insights and continue to drive efficiency and agility.
Foster an API program built on reuse and efficiency with the Kong Konnect Dev Portal
Portal adoption precedes API adoption. Give your developers everything they need to build a portal that developers as API consumers will actually use and trust with Konnect Dev Portal.
We’re excited to see the kinds of portals you build. Get your API reuse strategy up and running today!
Log in to Konnect here, or sign up for Konnect Plus and easily launch your first portal.
Unleash the power of APIs with Kong Konnect
