Cvent's Transformation of API Discovery and Quality with Postman Collections

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

• Buildings
• Cement

• Product Research & Development
• Quality Assurance

• Experimentation Automation
• Visual Quality Detection

• System Integration
• Testing & Certification

Cvent, a global event management platform, faced significant challenges with its API discovery due to its adoption of a microservices architecture. The company's portfolio of private, partner, and public APIs had grown immensely, making API discovery almost impossible. This was further complicated by the presence of hundreds of software development teams located around the world. Without a central source of API truth, engineers often recreated functionality that was already available elsewhere in the company. Additionally, the lack of a common API toolset across the company led to less productive collaboration between teams and longer onboarding times for both internal and partner developers. The company's engineering leadership recognized the need for a solution that would address their API discoverability and exploration challenges while maintaining speed and ease of development.

Cvent is a leading event management platform that serves professionals at each stage of the event management journey. The platform provides tools that automate and simplify the end-to-end event management process for event organizers, venue managers, and suppliers. Since its inception in 1999, Cvent has served 4.9 million events worldwide. The technology powering Cvent has grown to thousands of microservices, with a rich ecosystem of private, partner, and public APIs. The company has hundreds of software development teams located around the world.

Cvent adopted the OpenAPI Specification as the standard for specifying existing partner APIs as well as all future APIs. The company also incentivized teams to refactor their specs to OpenAPI to improve discovery of existing APIs. However, the larger part of the API discovery plan was to develop a single place where developers could find, learn, and test the company's APIs. Initially, the company intended to build an internal developer portal, but they found that Postman Collections offered the same benefits without the expense of an in-house solution. Postman also acted as a focal point for standardizing Cvent's approach to API governance. Each new API enters a review process which starts with the development team building and submitting a Postman Collection. This provides a common path for ensuring API quality, with engineers using the Postman Collection Runner to build and execute tests both manually and as part of their automated CI/CD pipelines.

• The implementation of Postman has enabled Cvent to improve collaboration, deliver higher-quality APIs, and progress towards API-first development. With Postman acting as a central register, developers now have a single place to browse and experiment with APIs. Postman Collections also enable developers to keep track of which version of an OpenAPI spec relates to the published version of an API in a particular region. This has made ongoing integration work easier. Postman has also streamlined the onboarding process for both internal and partner developers. Quality engineers now have greater autonomy as they can learn, test, and leave feedback about an API with minimal input from product engineers. Postman has also improved governance, eliminating the quality gap between internally facing services and external APIs. This has given engineers the confidence to build APIs that can be used by colleagues, partners, or the public.

• Improved API discovery across thousands of microservices

• More efficient cross-team collaboration

• Stronger quality assurance through standardization