Paylocity plans API design-first shift to modernize apps
A principal engineer says Postman's Spec Hub will help the company shift to a spec-first API development process for its event-driven microservices architecture.
The next step on an HR software company's journey to modern microservices is to go API design-first.
Paylocity, founded in 1997, was an early adopter of services-oriented architecture, a precursor to microservices, in the mid-2000s. Since 2019, the company has been working to extract the business logic from its applications and divide it into an event-driven, microservices-based architecture, in which small components of app logic are loosely coupled for faster, more scalable and flexible development and orchestrated by a system that responds to events in real time.
Many of the company's products, including recruiting, onboarding and benefits apps, have been converted to event-driven microservices, and the underlying orchestration has been updated from the RabbitMQ message broker to the AWS EventBridge serverless event bus. Some of Paylocity's largest core systems in payroll and HR are still undergoing conversion, while the company also prepares to refresh its API gateway from an older version of Nevatech Sentinet to the Kubernetes-based KrakenD and further revamp its API development process to strengthen API governance.
"[The work] is never really done, with the way our industry moves," said Ben Heil, principal engineer at the Schaumburg, Ill.-based company in a May interview with Informa TechTarget. "The next big thing is getting our modern API gateway released in the next few months … the CI/CD process for that API gateway forces teams to follow the design-first principle."
We're asking teams to produce their spec before their code is ever written … once they're [imported], developers have the green light to start writing their code against it.
Ben HeilPrincipal engineer, Paylocity
KrakenD Enterprise Edition can import OpenAPI specifications to create and update API endpoints and their configurations in a specification-first, or spec-first approach -- also known as API design-first. This represents a significant paradigm shift for Paylocity's 1,000 engineers, Heil said.
"With our old API gateway, we had teams who would put code hooks into their APIs that would then generate API specs that our gateway would consume and then expose their services -- this is the inverse of that," Heil said. "We're asking teams to produce their spec before their code is ever written … once they're [imported], developers have the green light to start writing their code against it."
This approach gives front-end web and mobile developers more freedom to start coding against an API contract instead of waiting for back-end developers to create it, Heil said. It also sets the stage for completing the migration to microservices and managing incoming requests from third-party AI agents, both of which revolve around APIs.
Paylocity looks to ease API design-first transition
However, working with spec files, which are more often used by software architects to establish API governance standards, can be daunting for developers used to working with API collections, sets of specific API request types.
"Manually updating a 63,000-line JSON file is not fun, and there are just not a lot of tools that help you manage that, [and some] are read-only, not interactive and not collaborative," he said.
Paylocity had also become an enterprise customer of API design vendor Postman in late 2023, and most developers at the company were longtime users of the tool for API testing. In April, Postman rolled out Spec Hub, a feature Heil said he believes will help developers update API specifications more easily.
Spec Hub connects OpenAPI 3.0 or AsyncAPI 2.0 API specifications more deeply to Postman API collections, so that users can generate collections from specs and specs from collections, according to Abhinav Asthana, CEO and founder at Postman, in a May interview with Informa TechTarget.
"We are also baking in governance rules that architects can deploy to monitor specs, so you can check whether specs conform to organizational standards," Asthana said.
Paylocity's developer teams are discussing with the company's governance team how to add Spec Hub to the API development process, Heil said.
"If I can get our developers over the hump of, 'I don't want to mess with this [spec] file, I'll just write some code and generate [an API],' to 'I have this nice design interface where I can collaborate with my team, I can sync it back to GitHub, and then the end product I can actually use in my API and write my code against it,' that's a that's a really powerful niche [for Postman to fill]," he said.
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
