You’ve probably heard the term API (application program interface) used more than a few times, but do you really understand what an API is, what it does, and how it works? In this article, we dissect the term and examine the many various aspects of an API call.

We are really excited to announce that you can now use Playwright in your browser checks. If you didn't know yet, Playwright is Microsoft's headless browser library. It's very similar to Puppeteer. In fact, it was built by the original creators of Puppeteer and has mostly the same features and a remarkably similar API. This was in our public roadmap and cooking for some time now and we're glad to have it out the door!

I have a beef with companies that don’t expose nearly everything their product can do with an API. I get anxious wondering, “why can I only do some of the things via the API? How is this sausage made?” Sure, there are plenty of examples of endpoints that shouldn’t be exposed, such as changing passwords probably should be kept private. Regardless, there are tons of examples of products that I can type in a field in the UI, but that field isn’t available in the API.

Webhooks, so what are they good for? Well, quite a lot as it turns out! Webhooks are great for integrating Cloudsmith with other systems that you use, by sending data or notifications to other tools in your stack and helping to enable automation across your workflows. I know what you’re thinking, this sounds a lot like an API right? Well, not quite. Webhooks are almost like a sibling of an API call. So, what’s the real difference?

We recently announced the general availability of our Elasticsearch Service API. APIs help to automate tasks such as creating and scaling deployments, integrating with existing workflows, and testing. The Elasticsearch Service API supports the Open API Specification, which allows you to use tools like Swagger to generate software development kits (SDKs) in any programming language. You can import the API spec onto Postman and create a Postman Collection to create a test suite.

When you build your application on top of Lambda, AWS automatically scales the number of “workers” (think containers) running your code based on traffic. And by default, your functions are deployed to three Availability Zones (AZs). This gives you a lot of scalability and redundancy out of the box. When it comes to API functions, every user request is processed by a separate worker. So the API-level concurrency is now handled by the platform.

Today, we hope to make testing Absinthe a bit easier for you. We believe that it’s a great library for writing GraphQL applications, but if you previously haven’t done much work on an Absinthe application, you might find some things a bit tricky to test.

After weeks of writing, researching and hopefully enough proofreading, we just launched a living collection of practical guides on leveraging headless browser tools (starting with Puppeteer and Playwright) for testing, monitoring, scraping, performance measuring and more. We called it theheadless.dev. This article is about the different approaches we tried in contributing ideas to the Puppeteer community, as well as the principles that guide our latest contribution.