Show HN: Skybear.net – A managed platform automating Synthetic HTTP API testing
Hey folks, I am finally posting a Show HN post for a project I have been working on for several months now, and it's in a state where I already get a lot of value myself, so I am happy to share broadly.

The pitch line is: "Skybear.NET is a managed platform automating Synthetic HTTP API testing."

At the moment, the main source file format supported for your API tests are Hurl.dev files [1]. Hurl is a CLI tool wrapping `curl` and it's really awesome. At least check that out :)

I am not affiliated directly with the Hurl CLI tool, and the platform I am building provides full Hurl compatibility.
I have been using Hurl for a few years now [2], and use it for my API testing, for orchestrating a bunch of HTTP APIs, and in general whenever I need to do anything with HTTP requests, I reach for Hurl.

You can try without signup the basic execution feature with the free Open Editor [3], but for full functionality (retaining responses and cron triggers) you need a signed in account, even free.

The Skybear.NET platform:

1. Has Hurl Compatibility, so take your local scripts and run them on the cloud as well. No changes needed.

2. Provides managed infrastructure for authoring, storing, and most importantly executing your Hurl scripts, that automatically scales to handle as many script runs as you need.

3. Generates detailed reports from your tests execution, automatically persisting requests and response bodies for introspection in the future, and with automatic insights coming up soon.

4. Supports multiple ways of triggering execution of your scripts, including periodic executions, and on-demand HTTP triggers enabling integration with your CICD pipelines.

Most importantly, it eliminates excessive per-request/per-step/per-check charges, leading to substantial cost-savings for complex multi-step API tests covering complete user-journeys.
I consider a "script project run" to be the main unit in my pricing, which includes execution of all the source files of the script project, which can be tens or hundreds of requests.

I am starting to document some of the architecture of the platform as well [4], but in a nutshell, all your data is encrypted inside the application before stored on AWS (S3, DynamoDB, also encrypting at rest) [5], the control plane runs on Hetzner and AWS EC2, and the execution servers running your scripts run on Fly and soon on AWS EC2 (for some plans).

Future plans depend a lot on feedback from users.
I already have a long list of things I personally want to have, but as more users start using I would like to see user needs influencing the roadmap more.

Some upcoming features:
1. Insights and metric graphs for historical tracking of your tests (per project, per file, per request URL).
2. Automatic generation of tests based on OpenAPI schemas, HAR files, etc.
3. Export API of all the data and reports for your own consumption.
4. OTEL traces generated per script run, exportable and sent to APM products.

Thank you, and I hope you find it interesting too!

Lambros Petrou

1. https://hurl.dev

2. https://www.lambrospetrou.com/articles/hurl/

3. https://www.skybear.net/scripts/open-editor/

4. https://www.skybear.net/docs/getting-started/what-is-skybear...

5. https://www.lambrospetrou.com/articles/encryption/