APIs are the fuel of modern innovation, but they have to be discoverable and easily consumable to drive the maximum possible value. Without an easy-to-use, developer-friendly discovery layer, Developers are stuck searching across disparate repositories for APIs, or — even worse — wasting time and effort building redundant APIs.
The market has already responded to this need with the API Developer Portal concept, where the portal acts as a central catalog for all APIs. However, many of the solutions on offer haven't kept up with modern standards around design and branding, documentation, API testing, and/or modern spec rendering.
Today, we're changing that. We've shipped the first public beta version of the brand-new Kong Konnect Developer Portal. The new Developer Portal comes with a new design and customization experience, a new Kong-engineered spec renderer, and a better API search and registration experience. Let’s explore all of the functionality in more detail.
Want to start building your dev portal for free? Get a 30-day free trial with Konnect Plus and start driving API adoption with professionally branded, modern developer portals.
If you build it…they won’t necessarily come. The experience needs to be great.
Part of a great experience is the look, feel, and layout. The new Konnect Developer Portal gives API Product Managers and Platform teams fine-grained control over elements from intuitive page layouts and portal-wide operation-level search capabilities to the interactive and comprehensive API documentation experience that we’ve redesigned. Read on to learn more!
For teams who want to get started quickly and launch a fully functional and on-brand portal in minimal time, we’ve custom-built a starter template that can be leveraged for the fastest and easiest onboarding experience. We’ll continue to deliver new pre-built Markdown Components (MDC) based on common use cases we’re seeing across our users.
If you’re looking for deeper customization, you can use Markdown Components to customize any page and view your edits in real-time with side-by-side preview directly in our new Portal Editor experience.
For those needing to follow strict branding guidelines, we offer custom CSS so you can integrate your brand’s style and highly polish the experience.
We can all agree this sort of API reference experience feels pretty outdated:
Unsatisfied with the UX and functionality of existing spec rendering tools, we built our own. Anywhere API specs are displayed, you can expect to see Kong’s spec renderer in action, including the new Dev Portal, Insomnia, Service Catalog, and our own Admin API documentation. We’re also rolling it out to the broader developer community as an open source web-app in the coming months. Stay tuned!
In beta, we support OpenAPI 3.x spec rendering. API producers and owners can upload a spec file to automatically generate and publish the latest API documentation across one or more developer portals. With built-in “Try it” capabilities in the UI, API consumers can test functionality directly within the browser, or in Insomnia, so they can quickly understand and get to the value of an API — in other words, adopt it properly — faster.
Our spec renderer will expand beyond synchronous protocols to support AsyncAPI, enabling API producers to publish both types seamlessly. This will ensure a unified tool for API rendering and a streamlined consumer DevEx (developer experience) with comprehensive, centralized documentation.
We’ve significantly simplified the API publishing flow, so you can simply upload a spec file to create their API entity:
You can then select preferred visibility (public/private) and authentication settings for publishing. The API will populate in the right portal(s) with modern, up-to-date, and interactive API reference:
Once an API entity is created in Konnect, you can:
API owners can also rest assured that their published API will be available to the right audience in a secure manner. This includes the ability to:
After publishing their API to a portal(s), owners/producers can evaluate and enhance their API’s usability and performance by leveraging key metrics accessible from the built-in Analytics dashboard in Konnect Dev Portal.
We’re excited for you to try out the new portal setup, API publishing, and customization experience.
To test it out, log in or register for Konnect Plus and launch your first Dev Portal in only a few clicks today!
If you’re a current Konnect customer interested in using the Dev Portal, please reach out to your Kong Customer Success Manager to help you get started! We look forward to seeing what you build with discoverable, well-documented, reusable APIs.
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