API Adoption To Increase in 2020; REST, Serverless and GraphQL Most Popular Survey Says

In 2020, APIs continue to gather popularity, as a recent survey reveals that two-thirds of developers said they expect to expand their use of APIs this year, compared to 2019. The survey was conducted by RapidAPI.

by Tom Donoghue

Tags: APIs, developers FaaS, GraphQL, RapidAPI, REST, serverless,

In 2020, APIs continue to gather popularity, as a recent survey reveals that two-thirds of developers said they expect to expand their use of APIs this year.  

 

Some two-thirds of respondents (66.5%) expect to use APIs more in 2020 compared to 2019. Only 6% said they expect to use APIs less in 2020 compared to 2019. The rest expect their API usage to remain the same or felt unsure, according to the survey, which was commissioned by RapidAPI. 

 

“The survey results confirm what we’ve seen with customers and partners - a massive upward trend in API usage as companies continue to invest in making services and assets available through digital transformation initiatives,” said Iddo Gino, RapidAPI Founder and CEO.

 

Interestingly, the survey also found REST interfaces dominate, but the use of webhooks, APIs for serverless, FaaS (function as a service) and GraphQL API query language are on the rise. 

 

In a section entitled Coding Experience vs. API Usage, the RapidAPI survey also found that developers have more years of coding experience are expected to use the same number of APIs or more in 2020 as opposed to 2019.

In part, the survey said:

Developers who report more years of coding\ experience were more likely to predict that they would use APIs more or about the same in 2020 as they did in 2019.

 

Over 91% of developers with five or more years of experience expect to use APIs more or about the same, compared to 82% of developers with one year or less. 

 

The number of APIs developers reported using in an application was also strongly correlated to their years of coding experience. Only 3% of developers with one year of experience reported integrating 50 or more APIs, compared to almost 20% of developers with 10 or more years of experience

“As the survey data suggests, this trend is present across all industries and API usage increases as a company’s software development team begins to expand. RapidAPI helps developers and organizations find connect and manage their APIs and microservices, enabling companies to bring products and services to market more rapidly, reduce duplicative work, and advance product innovation,” he added. 

API Survey

Statistics from RapidAPI Developer Survey and Insights

Some other key insights from the survey include:

 

Internal vs. External APIs: On average, companies use more internal APIs than external APIs. The study showed that 74 percent of companies used more internal APIs than external APIs. It also showed that internal API usages vary with company sizes

 

API Deployment: Almost 49 percent of the respondents surveyed indicated that the most common deployment option for APIs was a VM. More emerging deployments options were also very popular with developers as serverless technology was a close second, followed by Kubernetes with more than 25 percent.

 

REST Dominates but Serverless/FaaS and GraphQL on the Rise: Respondents were most familiar with REST APIs while newer technologies like gRPC were still not on the radar for many software developers. Similarly, REST was the most commonly used in production, while gRPC was not widely used. 

 

API Gateway Adoption: Respondents also weighed in on their usage of API gateways. A little over 22 percent indicated a preference for the Amazon API Gateway, while over 19 percent chose Oracle’s API Gateway. SAP and Apigee were third and fourth on the list - coming in at 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

 

Most Popular API Design Tools: Postman was the most popular design tool with respondents as more than 75 percent reported using the platform for design and development. 34 percent reported using Swagger UI while Insomnia came in third with 10 percent of those surveyed indicating a preference for the Insomnia tooling.

 

Most Developers Use VMs to Deploy APIs: When we asked developers where they deploy their APIs, the most common response was VMs (48.8%). Serverless was a close second (41.9%) followed by Kubernetes (25.6%). 

 

Trends in Developer API Approaches & Expertise: The survey went on to note: “We found developers were most familiar with REST and most unfamiliar with gRPC. Likewise, REST was the most commonly used in production, while gRPC was the least. Developers expressed the most interest in Serverless & FaaS (27.7% investigating or POCing) and GraphQL (19.7% investigating or POCing).”

 

Readers can download RapidAPI’s complete “Developer Survey and Insights” report here.

 

RapidAPI offers an API marketplace that lets developers find, test, and connect to thousands of APIs - all with a single account, API key, and SDK. It also lets API teams collaborate on a wide array of API projects.  




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