Kong Insomnia Software, 2 Dec 2021

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From YouTube: Keeping You Up (to Speed) With Insomnia

Description

Principal product manager of Insomnia, Wils Dawson covers the latest and greatest innovations with Insomnia, the industry-leading API development tool for designing, debugging and testing. Along with recently delivered features, you’ll hear about our vision, strategy and roadmap. Don’t blink — you’ll want to catch everything.

Learn more about Insomnia: https://insomnia.rest/

Follow along and grab the links in the blog version: https://konghq.com/blog/insomnia-roadmap-2022/

Watch more recordings from Kong Summit 2021 here: https://konghq.com/kong-summit/2021-videos

▬▬▬▬▬▬ TIMECODES ▬▬▬▬▬▬

0:09 Insomnia 2021 Release Highlights
2:56 Insomnia Projects Demo
4:57 Insomnia 2022 Roadmap
5:00 Insomnia Plugin Platform
8:00 Pluggable Automation Workflow
9:37 IDE Integration

#APIdesign #APItesting #GetInsomnia #KongSummit

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So now that we've kind of looked at the insomnia product division,, let's quickly, go over some highlights from the last 12 months about what insomnia has shipped.

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Speaker1: [00:07:44], so these are again are just some highlights,, but starting from the bottom here, we shipped some grpc support,, which is awesome that.

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We were able to do this., so we want to support more and more protocols., there's, definitely more.

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To go on the grpc front, for sure,, but we're really excited to bring that to all of you..

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And we're going to be looking at other protocols as well into the future like web sockets and more.

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We also released a portable exe for windows and continue to do so with each insomnia, release.

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This allows you to just run this executable, rather than installing it on your windows. Machine,.

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Which can be really nice,, particularly in some enterprise environments.. We also combined the.

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Application into a single application. previously,, we had both insomnia, studio and insomnia, designer.

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And we were able to combine those into a single application to make it easier for you to use and.

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Not have to switch contexts depending on which use cases you need to solve at a particular time.

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We also added theming support,, so we have lots of different themes available in insomnia.

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And we actually just recently launched the support for syncing better with your operating systems,.

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Light mode and dark mode. so definitely check that out. If you haven't yet.

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And get your insomnia themes the way you want it.

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speaker1: [00:09:07]. The next two items up here are really about the apiops pipeline that I was.

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Talking about and some of what you already saw in the keynote and other sessions earlier, today.

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But it's really about helping and adding new functionality for the declarative, configuration.

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Generation that the inso command-line tool uses.. So in addition to the insomnia application that.

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Lets you test and debug and design apis,. We also have a command line tool. That really is the key.

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For that apiops pipeline., the thing that you can run in see to run these tests that you build.

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And again generate this declarative, config generation for kong gateway and other products.

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We also converted insomnia to use typescript.. This is a huge win for us, both internally.

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So that we can help develop faster as well as the community, so that you can contribute in a.

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Modern application to really excited about. and finally,, most recently,, we open-sourced all of our.

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Documentation,, so we're really excited about this experience, now,, which is kind of rebranded for.

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You. and looking forward to any contributions or issues that you want to raise. There, definitely.

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Please,, please feel free to contribute to both the documentation and the insomnia products as well.

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And then finally,, as you probably heard in the keynote as well,, we.

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Just recently launched insomnia products, projects, excuse, me.,.

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Speaker1: [00:10:34] so with projects,, it's basically a new container that you can use,.

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Which can hold many designs and collections,, which of course, hold many paths or requests.

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So with that, I'm going to jump into a demo. and.share, my screen here. all right., so it should be sharing this now. there we go. insomnia., you may or may not be familiar with it.

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And here we have all of my different projects that I'm a part of.. So each of these ones, with the.

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Globe next to it is a remote project that I that is associated with a particular team.. So I'm here.

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In this konnect api project, currently. and then I can also have local projects and I can create.

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New local projects, if I'm debugging something or developing something on my own, for example.

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So within this connect api project,, you can see, I have different titles here., and these are these.

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Represent the different services within konnect,, some of the different services within connect.

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That we have., so if I jump into the runtime manager, for example,, which is a design document,.

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I can see all these different requests that are here, the full design open api, spec here.

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Which is great and lets me get hit the ground running when I'm joining a team.

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It lets me collaborate better with my team members as well. and further,. If I, if my.

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The rest of the team is building new services or creating these api collections for new services,.

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I have this option here to just pull these collections, so I can pull vitals.

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Right now, for example,, which looks like it's just getting started just as a couple of calls.

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Speaker1: [00:12:31] and there's definitely more to come here,, but also has documentation.

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Associated with it,, which also is just getting started for the purposes of this demo.

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But we're really excited about this opportunity to help you organize your apis and bring,. Some.

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Better productivity to you as well., so I'm going to jump back into the slides, now. and awesome. insomnia, really excited about what you'll do with those features. and now, let's jump into the roadmap and see where we're going. Next.

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So the first thing I want to talk about is the insomnia, plugin platform,, and we already have.

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Many great insomnia plugins that the community is using and has developed over time. we're really.

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Excited about more to come., we actually have,. If you're, not aware,, we have a summit hackathon,.

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A summit hackathon going on right, now. and one of the categories is best insomnia, plugin. and that.

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Closes at, I believe, midnight, tonight,, pacific time., so definitely still time to get hacking and.

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Create a great insomnia, plugin., there's some awesome prizes as well,, so quick plug for that.

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Speaker1: [00:13:50], but over time, and as we move into next year,, we're really excited to.

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Kind of reinvigorate this plugin platform. and some reasons for that. we're seeing that users.

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Love insomnia., all of you love insomnia, because it's really simple., we think simplicity, is one of.

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The key tenets for how we want to build insomnia going forward., but at the same time, you know,. We.

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Get lots of feature requests which those of you on engineering teams or product teams will definitely.

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Know that story very well. and we know we need to keep up with a rapidly evolving.

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Industry. you know,. I was mentioning earlier adding typekit support and saying web sockets.

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And other protocols that are coming out,, not to mention many other features unrelated to protocols.

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That we'll need to add over time as well., and so we really need to figure out how to add these.

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Features, keep up with the evolving industry and landscape without necessarily creating an airplane.

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Cockpit with bells and whistles and dials all over the place., and we really think that that's.

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Where plugins can come into play for all of you to help with the situation. and so really,? What.

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We want to do is be able to take plugins to the next level, offer you more apis,, more hooks into.

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Insomnia to make more interesting plugins that are more valuable and more useful for your use. Cases.

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Speaker1: [00:15:10], and we really think that that will provide sort of an opt-in complexity.

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For users. they can say, well,, I'm developing graphical,, but not actually grpc, for example,. So.

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Maybe they can have a set of those plugins and not have to worry about the noise that comes with all.

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Of the other protocols that they may not use and stuff like that., so they're really able to craft.

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Insomnia in the user interface there to match what they need from that tool., then we also think that.

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Will start a flywheel of innovation,, so we're more plugins being built will solve more use. Cases.

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More use cases mean more users can use the tool to get the job that they need. Done. and those.

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New users will bring more needs, more ideas, and that will generally generate more plugins as well,.

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And the cycle will continue., so we're really excited about continuing this innovation. Again,.

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Helping you stay at that forefront of technology as well., so look out for that next year. and if.

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You have ideas or want to reach out to us about how this might work? definitely feel free.

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It's the next feature. We're going to look at is pluggable authentication.

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Sorry, pluggable automation, workflows. and speaking of plugins,.

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We also wanted to bring this to the enso command-line tool,, which I mentioned. Earlier.

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Speaker1: [00:16:26], so again,, the enso command-line tool is really the workhorse.

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For these api, ops, workflows. and we've heard some problems with that as well,. So.

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Each organization,, namely it will have different, slightly different standards that they want to.

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Enforce., nobody necessarily uses all the same ones.. They may have different alerting needs.

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Or different deployment environments that they need to operate and orchestrate deployments do,.

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Et cetera. so really,. What this comes down to is that today, there's lots of custom scripts,.

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There's lots of manual work that needs to be integrated into these pipelines and workflows.

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Which sort of goes against that core principle of api, ops,, automation,, automation,, automation.

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So what we really want to do here is provide hooks into that automation system into enso itself to.

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Help you write code or use other plugins to really get what you need done and offering templates for.

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Common additions., so one of the, for example,, one of the things that we've heard a lot is is custom.

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Lending policies that you want to enforce around an open api spec.. So that's one of the things that.

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We're going to be looking at targeting earlier on., but really, with this kind of plugins for.

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So we want to offer more of that end-to-end api., apiops story,, so definitely excited about that.

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Next is ide integrations,, so again, problems we're hearing from our community.

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Is that switching between different tools and contexts can be pretty burdensome.

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Speaker1: [00:18:04] switching between your writing code. building an api and then you.

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Need to go test this thing or call out to this api or write some design, spec and tapping out to go to.

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Insomnia., maybe copy-pasting something back over to vs code. That's both tedious and error-prone, and.

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A lot of cases. and we're also seeing increasingly more and more work being done within that id,.

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Really, starting to actually live up to its name of that integrated development environment, where it.

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Can do kind of everything. of course,, that's not for everybody. personally,. I still like doing get.

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Commands in my terminal, for example,, but a lot of people really get a lot of value from that.

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And certainly, I'm seeing myself a lot of value from and save time savings from not doing that. so.

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We really want to start experimenting with an insomnia id extension and potentially multiple.

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Our goal with that is really to make development for you all more efficient., we'll help eliminate.

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The need for that context switching and get the api development kind of closer to where the rest.

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Of the development is happening within that id., so again,, something to look out for next year.

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And again,, if you have feedback or questions about that,, happy to answer and.

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Hear any suggestions as well. so with that,? That's all the time that I have in the presentation.