APIs have been around roughly for around two decades, but it is only in the past couple of years that the concept of “API First” gained traction with the software development teams. The number of developers taking an API-First approach to building products is increasing daily. In simple terms, API First means that your API is the first user interface of your application.
Here at Cohesity, we pride ourselves on using the API-first approach in everything we do. The benefits are many — ensuring good developer experiences, increased speed to market with tools like swagger that help you generate API Docs, SDKs, reduced cost while developing apps as APIs, and code reuse across multiple different projects. You can see all our publicly documented APIs, their documentation, SDKs, and getting started resources on the Cohesity Developer Portal.
With Cohesity APIs supporting multiple use cases, it’s important that we make the API consumption easy for our customers and developers to use our APIs for any automation/customization. Moving one step ahead from just pointing to the API documentation, we have made it even easier for customers and developers.
Introducing Cohesity Postman Public Workspace
Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs, which simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs faster.
To improve the Cohesity developer experience, we have introduced Cohesity Postman Public Workspace. This workspace hosts many Cohesity workflows in the form of Postman Collections, which are a tidy way to group your requests together so you can save, reuse, and share them with others.
The Cohesity workspace on Postman includes collections that cover a wide range of workflows with sample request body and saved responses wherever possible. All of these workflows also have clear documentation explaining how the APIs are used. These collections are not merely API documentation but are full-fledged workflows with all the API calls in sequence that you may need to perform this workflow.
If you take the VMware workflow for example, it covers the following APIs: Registering Source -> Protecting VMware Objects -> Running Backup -> Recover VMware Objects -> Unregister VMware.
One handy feature in Postman is setting variables (Collection or Global) by reading the response and extracting the required value, which is used extensively throughout the collections. Variables help users to effectively use these collections. We have also documented the environments that you can use with a particular Postman collection, in which you need to set some global variables before you can start using the collection. But wait, there is more…
Apart from adding more workflows to the Postman public workspace, we also have a Community Collection for you where you can submit your own API workflow or automation that you use. Your submitted API workflows will then be available for anyone to use and benefit from. Our goal is to make this workspace a One-Stop-Shop for all API workflows with sample requests and documentation so that anyone trying to create any automated workflow can come here and find what they need.
Postman Featured Collection
We are proud to announce that our Data Protect (DMaaS) API Collection was recently featured by Postman as one of its top API collections. You can check it out here. Also check out Postman’s LinkedIn and Twitter Posts.
Wrap Up
Cohesity workspace covers various workflows like VMware, NAS, Physical, O365 and many more, including both on prem and DMaaS along with workflows for VCD Integration.
We are constantly working on adding more workflows and we would love to hear from you with your suggestions and feedback. In the meantime, keep using our Postman Collections and don’t forget to submit your API collections to be hosted in the Community Collection for bragging rights 🙂
