API Development
Developing and testing APIs against live public api endpoints can introduce delays, dependencies, and risks that slow down your delivery pipeline. With Blackbird's API Mocking capabilities, you can simulate real-world API behavior, enabling faster iteration, independent testing, and seamless integration.
Mocking APIs in Blackbird is fast, and our newest enhancement lets you mock against popular API specs instantly, either in your browser or with the Blackbird CLI. Let’s review an example of when you would want to mock against a popular public API.
Adding an AI Chatbot using OpenAI API
Let’s say you are a developer working on the frontend code for a fintech company that specializes in helping you create healthy spending habits, including budgeting for your goals. You’ve been tasked with creating an interactive AI chatbot that helps users develop a budget based on their spending habits. To do this, you have decided to integrate OpenAI’s API into your product.
January 9, 2025 | 7 min read
API Development
Now three months post launch—Ambassador’s Blackbird API Development Platform is taking API development to new heights with two powerful enhancements designed to supercharge your workflow.
First, broaden your horizons with expanded language and framework support, enabling you to generate boilerplate code across a vast range of technologies—from Python and Go to C#, Kotlin, and more. With seamless OpenAPI integration, the enhanced code generator feature slashes repetitive tasks and lets you focus on building robust APIs in the stack of your choice.
We also added a Chaos mode to mocking, which will help you uncover hidden bugs by testing how your system handles unexpected failures or delays. In Chaos mode, you can now easily simulate real-world scenarios for your mock API endpoints.
January 6, 2025 | 5 min read
API Development
Traditional development environments frequently face difficulties such as dependency conflicts, unreliable deployment methods, and lengthy setup periods, which can reduce productivity and delay time-to-market. To solve these difficulties, many development teams are adopting container-based development environments.
Containers combine an application and its dependencies into a single, lightweight entity that can operate consistently across several computing environments. This encapsulation guarantees that programs perform reliably across multiple environments, including a developer's local machine, a staging server, and production. Organizations that use a container-first approach can improve team cooperation, minimize defects, and streamline development workflows.
In this article, we will look at why container-based development environments are transforming the software industry. We'll look at their components, emphasize their benefits, and offer actionable suggestions for improving your process. Finally, we'll talk about how containers will affect the future of development and provide a powerful platform to help you get started.
January 3, 2025 | 23 min read
API Development
The old staging environment of Ambassador was just a set of namespaces in the same cluster as our production environment. Using namespaces to separate environments is not ideal since changes in staging can affect production.Using namespaces to separate environments is not ideal since changes in staging can affect production.
For example, updating cluster resources like Edge Stack CRDs could impact the whole cluster. It also made us deploy some staging changes manually instead of using the GitOps-style continuous delivery approach due to the risk of breaking production and, as such, missing the key benefits GitOps provides. Migrating applications to a new environment can be challenging due to differences between external dependencies, hardware constraints, etc. In addition, applications constantly change, which makes it difficult to keep the environments up to date.
In this article, I’ll explain how mutating admission controllers enabled us to quickly update the manifests for the new environment while keeping the old environment running.
December 31, 2024 | 9 min read
API Development
These days, building APIs isn’t just writing code - it’s like assembling a puzzle with pieces that keep changing shape. In this guide, I’ll explain why API development has gotten so complex, from managing diverse ecosystems to ensuring robust security and reliable performance. But more importantly, I’ll introduce you to tools like Blackbird that simplify the chaos. Whether you’re trying to debug faster, streamline workflows, or avoid the dreaded “works on my machine” syndrome, you’ll find actionable insights to help you deliver quality APIs without losing your sanity.
The Growing Complexity of Modern API Development
Building APIs today is trickier than ever because you must integrate with diverse technologies, ensure robust security to protect sensitive data, and optimize for speed to meet user expectations for fast application performance.
December 19, 2024 | 9 min read
API Development
AI has taken the software world by storm, but it's not just about automating mundane tasks anymore. It's about revolutionizing the entire development process from the ground up.
Imagine turning vague project ideas into fully fleshed-out, actionable specifications in minutes instead of days. Imagine no longer spending hours in back-and-forth discussions only to end up with misaligned requirements.
AI isn’t just helping—it’s becoming your copilot (pun intended), pushing your productivity into overdrive, and slashing the time it takes to go from concept to code. Whether you're a seasoned developer or new to the world of APIs, AI tools are here to supercharge your efficiency, reduce your headaches, and elevate the quality of your software.
December 11, 2024 | 15 min read
