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Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

blog.postman.com

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Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#71

Post by finitestateuni »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #57
finitestateuni wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you understand how moat is used in this context. A moat isn’t impossible to cross, just harder to cross than a lawn. Also, I don’t think you can saw two features are the same unless the quality is the same. Two sms apps are not equal if one of them occasionally fails to send/receive messages.

If you include quality as moat, by that definition postman has the moat of better quality, higher brand reputation and having more money.

I agree that postman has a moat. I think it’s important to say that every company has a moat in that they’re organized, located somewhere, and have customers. The size of the moat varies. We can treat a moat as a scalar value of dollars to cross.

Every company also has a valuation, either through public markets, private markets, or discounted cash flows.

A house cleaning company has a moat of trained cleaners, existing client generation process, goodwill of existing clients, etc. If the value of their discounted cash flows exceed the cost of crossing their moat, they are vulnerable.

The argument is that crossing postman’s moat would cost much less than their private valuation, and their future roadmap is unlikely to build a moat that is significantly harder to cross.

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#72

Post by matwood »

surgical_fire wrote: post #62
madduci wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now they are forcing to register to their platform to continue using the collections for free. So most of the users will have to enter their data, or just leave the product (difficult, there's not that much alternative)

I much prefer the HTTP client that comes with IntelliJ, to be frank.

Same. I can version *.http files with the project so others can easily use them.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#73

Post by matwood »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #32
asfasfo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has a search index. Apple has hardware & manufacturing IP.

How is search index a moat? It's hard to build, yes, but there is no moat here and anyone can build it as long as they have infra, talent and money. Also for Apple while I am not sure, but looking at the Android phones there is hardly any feature of Apple which hasn't been covered by some Android phone, so I don't think IP is an issue. It's just that overall quality is much more consistent for Apple across generation…

> It's hard to build

The definition of a moat.

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#74

Post by finitestateuni »

drewcoo wrote: post #38
finitestateuni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!

> Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? Yes! It's supports functional BDD-style tests, "mock servers" (really "fake" servers), a walled garden for saving and sharing data (to frustrate engineering managers and ops folks), perf tests (soon? now?), contract testing, and more. Did I mention that it's a GUI tool, so it must be "easier?" They're trying to become a one-stop-shop for dumbing down web dev. Ideally, inside t…

The contract testing is something I didn’t know about, I’ll have to look into it!

We have lots of unit, integration, and live canary testing, the postman usage was only during oncall/operations, so we weren’t using any of those neat features.

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#75

Post by next_xibalba »

xeromal wrote: post #45
finitestateuni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!

I have a few qualms with this app: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them s…

Classic HN response–"This is trivial to build"/"I could build this in a weekend".

Setting valuation aside, clearly there is some non-negative value prop for some set of users who don't want to build everything themselves (as evidenced by the fact that they have a non-trivial number of paying users).

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#76

Post by yankput »

finitestateuni wrote: post #16
andrewguenther wrote: post #2

Try as they might, I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation...

Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!

This is a very uninformed comment.

It’s like saying web browser doesn’t do anything that curl doesn’t. It’s technically true but not really.

But it’s also technically incorrect. Even on request level, not speaking about all the things on top that Postman does, Postman also does grpc and graphql (edit: and websocket), which curl doesn’t.

Once you start adding all the features, it’s very hard to replace Postman with anything.

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#78

Post by ultrafez »

xeromal wrote: post #45
finitestateuni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!

I have a few qualms with this app: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them s…

Your first point is almost a meme at this point - so many products can be written off as pointless with the statement:

> As a [type of tech person], [product] is completely unnecessary as you can easily build a similar system yourself by simply combining [tool A] with [tool B] and [tool C]. It's so simple!

I'm not disagreeing with your point, but it misses the point that often the benefit of using a particular product is that you don't have to build it yourself, not to mention the other benefits you could get from using the exact same system as somebody else (e.g. sharing Postman collections).

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#79

Post by aniforprez »

ehutch79 wrote: post #48
boredumb wrote: post #9

Insomnia has always served me much better than postman

Insomnia feels like it's falling down the same rabbit hole as postman. It's used to be a more usable, less overbuilt, bloated, alternative to postman, but now... meh

I don't think I've seen any real material difference to Insomnia towards the negative after they were acquired. It still works just fine. It's far FAR less bloated than Postman and easier to use than alternatives like Paw (now RapidAPI)

Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

#80

Post by fosk »

ehutch79 wrote: post #48
boredumb wrote: post #9

Insomnia has always served me much better than postman

Insomnia feels like it's falling down the same rabbit hole as postman. It's used to be a more usable, less overbuilt, bloated, alternative to postman, but now... meh

What don't you like about Insomnia?
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