Airbyte launched two SDKs and a Terraform provider with hundreds of resources - in just a few weeks

Key Takeaways

Offering a Terraform Provider and SDKs Accelerates Adoption and Improves Customer Experience

Airbyte (opens in a new tab) (W’20 YC) is an open-source data integration platform, syncing data from applications, APIs & databases to destinations such as data warehouses, data lakes & databases. Their developer-first approach has led to a robust and loyal community, with 40,000+ users and over ⭐ 10K on Github (opens in a new tab).

The Airbyte API enables customers to programmatically control the Airbyte platform. For example, users can easily create a new source, update a destination, and change data sync frequency.

Thanks to Speakeasy SDKs, Airbyte’s customers can rapidly integrate with the API, without needing to read through pages of docs, or write and debug a lot of boilerplate code. Customers simply import the SDK and call the relevant methods.

“Airbyte’s API is an important part of our platform. We recognized that to do it justice, we needed to make it as easy as possible to use. Great SDKs and docs are a fundamental part of that story. Early after the initial launch, I asked a customer what they thought about our Python SDK. Their reply was “🔥🔥🔥- sharing with my friends at other companies now”. A good reminder how improving the developer experience can improve the reputation of the product, and the likelihood of its recommendation within its ecosystem.”

Riley Brook, Product @ Airbyte

In addition, Speakeasy also creates and maintains a Terraform provider for the Airbyte API. By allowing customers to control Airbyte through Terraform they enable customers to manage their “Infrastructure as Code” and have a superior product experience. For customers, this enables:

• Rapid deployment and configuration
• Version control and collaboration of Terraform configuration
• Automated deployment and scaling across different environments
• More robust deployments, with reduced errors thanks to explicit and declarative configuration

Offering a Terraform provider is also a compelling strategic move for Airbyte:

• Unlocking access to the Terraform community
• Streamlined customer onboarding
• Greater competitive differentiation
• Increasing product stickiness by embedding Airbyte within a company’s infrastructure

“Giving customers access to our platform through Terraform allows us to gain access to an important community, and solidifies our position as a critical layer within the data infrastructure stack.”

Riley Brook, Product @ Airbyte

Speakeasy Uses Existing OpenAPI Spec to Minimize Eng Burden

Creating and maintaining SDKs and Terraform providers can be a huge lift for engineering and product teams — particularly at the scale at which Airbyte is operating:

“Airbyte has around ~450 resources and data sources. To build a Terraform Provider without Speakeasy would require a gargantuan effort — at least 3 months to MVP and likely 9 months to GA”

Bryce Groff, Engineering Manager @ Airbyte

Speakeasy offers a dramatically simpler approach:

“With Speakeasy, the Terraform provider and SDKs are all created from our existing OpenAPI specs. Our eng team simply annotated the spec for each resource to include in the TF provider for example. The total time to get everything setup, annotated and customized was around 4 weeks – a huge improvement in time-to-market and cost”

Bryce Groff, Engineering Manager @ Airbyte

There is also a huge ongoing saving in terms of cost and developer toil:

“Updating the OpenAPI spec whenever the underlying API changes is trivial — especially compared with the alternative, editing the SDKs and provider by hand. We can also trust that the interfaces Speakeasy provides are always up-to-date with the latest changes in the Terraform, Java and Python ecosystems.”

Bryce Groff, Engineering Manager @ Airbyte

We’re excited to partner with the Airbyte team, to make an amazing modern data platform even better for its users.