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Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
- frankfrank13 3y agoWith what cash???
- nickstinemates 3y agoCongrats to the Akita team! Repository is 2 years old. That's a pretty quick exit.
- swyx 3y agojean yang is pretty much an industry legend at this point, and was hyperfocused on her specific kind of o11y (ebpf based drop-in traffic monitoring) which is an obviously important part of an overall o11y product suite that i think many players would either have to build or buy. i imagine she had her pick of acquirers. edit: check out her interviews! crazy impressive https://www.listennotes.com/top-podcasts/jean-yang/ https://www.listennotes.com/top-podcasts/jean-yang/
- afandian 3y agoo18y = "observability" to save you a click.
- Modified3019 3y agoThanks, I had no idea that was even a supposed abbreviation.
- Vgoose 3y agoI've actually seen more of her name than Akita itself. In a way, that's great marketing.
- equilibrium 3y agohate to be a prick but is there a difference between o11y and observability? or is the word observability just too long to type out
- FunnyLookinHat 3y agoYup - same idea as a11y - just easier to type. :-)
- gillh 3y agoCompanies that pioneered the stateful reconstruction of APIs from raw network events - - Netsil [0] (acquired by Nutanix) - Academic spin-out from UPenn - Pixie Labs [1] (acquired by New Relic) [0]: https://thenewstack.io/netsil-visualizes-performance-microservices/ https://thenewstack.io/netsil-visualizes-performance-microse... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/new-relic-acquires-kubernetes-observability-platform-pixie-labs/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/new-relic-acquires-kuberne...
- swyx 3y agowhy do you think these companies, though successful in their own right, never became bigger standalone observability platforms?
- gillh 3y agoWhile the tech these companies built (stateful reconstruction) is quite hard to engineer, large-scale observability platforms like Datadog were much more successful as they could cover a much larger surface area with minimal incremental effort. Even APM companies like New Relic and AppD struggled to justify the value they were delivering with their well-engineered code-level agents in the face of large-scale server/process metrics collection done by the Datadog agent. In addition, these techniques have been prone to event misses (partial reconstruction) in case the ring buffer overflows and are ineffective in the face of SSL traffic.
- swyx 3y agoconcise summary. thank you! i guess simple is best.
- jchonphoenix 3y agoAkita has been around awhile. I remember talking to them around the time docker was still winning the container wars
- nickstinemates 3y agoThat could be anytime between 2013 and now :)
- sdesol 3y agoLooks like a significant amount of work is being done in private since there is almost no activity for the public org repos, so it's hard to say how long they've been working at it. https://devboard.gitsense.com/akitasoftware https://devboard.gitsense.com/akitasoftware The org has had 304 contributors over the course of the org's history though. Full Disclosure: This is my tool
- jeanyang 3y agoThank you! I've been at it since 2018 and we've been working on the repo since 2020, after pivoting from API security. -Jean from Akita
- dgacmu 3y agoCongrats, Jean! Hope it's a good integration. -- Dave
- andrewguenther 3y agoTry as they might, I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation...
- phpnode 3y agoIt's an absolutely crazy valuation for the product / industry. Ultimately they're competing with free & good enough. What's their moat?
- cemerick 3y agoAs long as they're approximately the only "enterprise" option, that's a moat all by itself. No comment on the valuation, but it makes for a very resilient business.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smt88 3y agoWhat makes them an enterprise option? Why does an enterprise need Postman at all? The collaboration features aren't useful on any size team.
- cemerick 3y agoWell, they have the organizational maturity to accommodate enterprise customers, and in contrast to much of this subthread, they don't say things like "just use curl".
- smt88 3y agoIn what way do enterprise customers need accommodation? If they all used Insomnia or Firecamp, what would be different?
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
- mrv_asura 3y agoI have never used Postman, but I am curious, how useful or good, if any, their product is? given the recent bashing it received for being over-valued and being just a wrapper around curl. If people like it and are willing to pay for it, isn't its valuation justified, which I think is true for any startup in general.
- smt88 3y agoPostman was fantastic as a GUI for curl many years ago. After raising money, they bloated the app with confusing, half-baked features, and whoever was in charge of their usability really botched it. It's unusable now and I used to dread opening it up. I switched to Firecamp[1] and have been very happy with it. 1. https://firecamp.io/ https://firecamp.io/
- maccard 3y agoIt's a good tool, and it's as much a wrapper around curl as intellij is a wrapper around notepad. That said, it's not worth paying more for than GitHub per seat for my team, so we do without.
- where-group-by 3y agoIt's useful, but it's very hard to justify the $19 per user per month to management unless you're using it constantly like an IDE instead of visiting once in a while to check the docs.
- boredumb 3y agoInsomnia has always served me much better than postman
- quaffapint 3y agoPostman was the way to go when it first came out. But then they started throwing everything into it so it became the most convoluted and horrible ux I could imagine. I also switched to Insomnia, and it's like going back in time to the cleanliness of Postman way back when.
- RussianCow 3y agoGive it another few years and people will be saying the exact same thing about Insomnia and some new product on the market. The company behind Insomnia is also VC-funded, so this is almost inevitable.
- ehutch79 3y agoInsomnia 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
- aniforprez 3y agoI 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)
- ehutch79 3y agoI didn't even know they got aquired. It's been a long time since i used it.
- fosk 3y agoWhat don't you like about Insomnia?
- juli1pb 3y agoCongratulation to Jean and the Akita team!
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWow, Akita looks awesome and super powerful/simple for o11y - IMO one of the most important things you can do for enterprises being coherent with their data. I look forward to trying it. That said, powerful observability tools (Solarwinds anyone?) are really hard to make persistently secure, especially as they grow in their cumulative observations. I'm not really sure there exists a turn-key approach to secure these systems at scale without oppressive overhead or a near perfect team. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about a mis-configured security group on an Akita instance caused a sev1 within 5 years. Definitely not unique to either Akita or Postman but always worth discussing IMO Congrats to Jean and the Akita team!
- pm90 3y agoI don’t get the appeal of Postman. Collections are great but I’ve always preferred plain old curl.
- jacobsenscott 3y agoHow do you refresh your bearer token when needed, and have it automatically apply to all 20 api's you are curling. Bash scripts or whatever don't count, because then you aren't using "plain old curl"
- pm90 3y agoDefine custom fish functions to generate bearer tokens. Also... I think you're being a little pedantic here. Bash scripts are the automation already available to every terminal users. Their use is implied.
- nullcipher 3y agohttps://hoppscotch.io/ https://hoppscotch.io/ is an alternative
- Darmody 3y agoI only wish Postman didn't freeze when adding a big JSON to a request. If you add it through their interface it freezes for a while in the best case scenario or freezes until you kill it. Postman on my Mac is now broken because a big JSON (almost 1mb) is stored on one of the opened tabs which makes it freezes on launch. I'll have to purge everything and install it again, thankfully that tab isn't saved in my profile so it won't be there... I think fixing that is more important that acquiring new companies.
- adursun 3y agoHow does this compare to solutions like ddosify? Their open source tools are quite useful
- doakes 3y agoCan anyone recommend a non-electron alternative to Postman?
- jacobsenscott 3y agorestclient for emacs is very nice.