How ConductorOne saves 100s of Eng hours while raising the bar on DevEx

Founded in 2020, ConductorOne (opens in a new tab) is dedicated to providing secure identity for the modern workforce. Companies today suffer from identity sprawl, with accounts and permissions spread across multitudes of SaaS and IaaS apps. Identity compromise is the leading cause of data breaches, with orphaned and over-provisioned accounts posing serious risks to organizations. ConductorOne provides an automation platform for managing the lifecycle of permissions and access across SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure, providing a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes looking to improve their security posture and reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

Challenge

At ConductorOne, a key element of their company philosophy is to meet customers where they are. When they decided to roll out an enterprise API to their customers, that meant ensuring maximum accessibility. The first fundamental decision they had to make was what protocol they wanted to use to expose their API: REST or gRPC. Internally, their teams built and consumed gRPC services. However, for the public API, they decided to expose a RESTful interface to appeal to the greatest number of users possible. They built a custom plugin (opens in a new tab), forked from gRPC gateway (opens in a new tab) that generates a Go server with a REST gateway exposed to their users.

“When we're exposing an API, it's important to us that we make it accessible to the highest number of people using the highest number of tools.”

Logan Saso, Senior Software Engineer at ConductorOne

However, exposing their services as a REST API was only half the battle. To ensure maximum accessibility, the ConductorOne product and engineering teams had a mission to provide ease of integration, across multiple languages and run times. They wanted to ensure each customer has a fast and efficient means of integrating their systems with the ConductorOne platform. They know that a lot of work can go into using an API, especially one with no software development kit (SDK). Developers don't have the time to learn an undocumented API, nor to re-write code that has been written thousands of times before. The team knew they wanted to provide SDKs to materially lower the barrier for integration for their customers and internal users. And they knew that well-crafted SDKs and documentation equates to happy developers.

Just as API integration without an SDK can be arduous work for a customer, creating SDKs for those customers can be an equally tall order, especially when you want to build idiomatic SDKs with type-safety, and provide docs across multiple languages. ConductorOne wanted to take it a step further even, by also providing a Terraform (TF) provider to allow Terraform code to interact with their API to automate the setup/configuration process and ensure stability of the customer's infrastructure. A tall order indeed!

As they worked through their API strategy, they realized that signing up for the creation of SDKs and Terraform providers meant potentially taking on significant development overhead and an ongoing maintenance burden. Every update to their API would result in a multiplier effect on the amount of work: with multiple SDK updates and a TF provider update, and as their API scales with their rapidly evolving product, this could quickly become an untenable resource challenge.

Solution

Given ConductorOne's commitment to meeting their customers where they already are, this meant the need for multiple SDKs for Go, TypeScript, and Python, and the desire to produce a Terraform provider. The team had experience with SDK generators, but in their experience, they usually ended up having to do a lot of rework, and create documentation for the SDK. As they were exploring possible solutions for their API, the team was introduced to Speakeasy. Speakeasy uses AI to validate and enhance a customer's OpenAPI specifications, and automatically generates idiomatic SDKs in multiple languages. Additionally, Speakeasy creates Terraform providers from the OpenAPI specifications, enabling developers to easily provision and manage infrastructure using their APIs.

Utilizing Speakeasy, ConductorOne was able to create SDKs developed for multiple programming languages and to generate a new Terraform provider in a flash, making it easier for developers to use the ConductorOne API regardless of their preferred programming language or environment. And they were able to do so all while radically reducing development time – reducing the burden on their valuable engineering resources.

Time is an important dimension, but for ConductorOne, SDK and Terraform provider quality are even more important. As the primary interface for APIs, ConductorOne understood that their SDKs are perhaps the single most important component of their developer experience. With Speakeasy, ConductorOne is able to ensure their SDKs are type safe and idiomatic and that they are able to provide a best-in-class developer experience.

Results

For ConductorOne, when it came to their API, they were hyper-focused on how they could meet their customers where they are by supporting diverse integration options, and creating a friction free developer experience. At the same time, internally they were focused on how quickly they could ship their API, SDKs, and Terraform provider. And on top of it all, they were committed to supporting all of these surfaces for a quickly evolving product and rapidly growing user base.

Developing 3 SDKs and a Terraform provider, coding by hand, would take a team of developers weeks to produce. By their estimation, utilizing Speakeasy, ConductorOne was able to save between 400 to 500 hours of development for the SDKs; and another 150 plus hours for the generation of their Terraform provider. Not only did this translate into major cost savings, it translated into significant development hours they were able to re-allocate into other strategic development priorities.

"If we had to write multiple SDKs ourselves, manually, even with a spec, we'd be looking at multiple weeks of work for multiple people. With Speakeasy, it saves us 100s of hours, a heck of a lot of time, without a doubt!"

Logan Saso, Senior Software Engineer at ConductorOne

Better still, the savings - both hours and dollars - continue to compound over time. With Speakeasy, they are able to automatically regenerate their SDKs, provider, and docs each time they update their API.

Aside from cost and time savings, one of the greatest benefits realized by ConductorOne has been the ongoing benefit of eliminating the mental strain of having to remember every update to make, to every surface, every time the API changes. No longer does the team have to update 10+ SDKs by opening 10+ GitHub repos, finding the files in question, finding the relevant lines of code, updating the code, and testing to make sure it still works. All that work. 10+ times over. For every change. The more SDKs, the more endpoints, the more that work scales, the more hours it takes and more mental strain. But not with Speakeasy on the job.

With Speakeasy, the SDKs and Terraform providers are always up-to-date and versioned. Every time the API changes, SDKs/TF providers are updated and republished automatically. And bring on the scaling... scale from 1 language to n languages with a click! And gain the priceless benefit of peace of mind.

"Auto-generating updates makes me a lot happier,it means that I can get off work on time and still get everything I need to do, done for the day!"

Logan Saso, Senior Software Engineer at ConductorOne

To see the results first hand, take a closer look at ConductorOne's SDKs and Terraform provider here:

• Go SDK (opens in a new tab)
• Python SDK (opens in a new tab)
• Typescript SDK (opens in a new tab)
• TF Provider (opens in a new tab)

Gain your own peace of mind, try Speakeasy for yourself for free. Sign up (opens in a new tab) today.