Yahoo! Japan Deploys Kong Enterprise API Platform to Improve Service Development Productivity
New platform centralizes API portfolio and improves the security, availability and performance of services
SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYO September 13, 2018 Kong Inc., the leading API platform for modern architectures, andBriscola Inc., the partner company of Kong since 2016, located in Tokyo, today announced thatYahoo! Japanhas deployedKongs Enterprise API platformto improve productivity in service development for expanding its business.
Yahoo! Japan Corporation offers more than 100 web-based services, including search engine, auction, news, weather, sport, email and shopping. Yahoo! Japan is the undisputed market leader in terms of users and page views with more than 11 billion users and more than 70 billion page views each month. As a technology-driven company, innovation is at the core of Yahoo! Japans DNA. To maintain market leadership, Yahoo! Japan began transitioning to microservices to accelerate service development and deployment. Consequently, Yahoo! Japan needed a new API platform to centralize its portfolio of APIs and improve the security, availability and performance of its services. With its shift to microservices and an API-centric architecture, Yahoo! Japan needed more than just a gateway it needed a true high-performance platform built for centralizing and managing APIs across a modern architecture.
We moved rapidly towards microservices over the past few years, and we needed to centralize our APIs, said Kanaderu Fukuda, senior manager of computing platform at Yahoo! Japan. We began looking into API gateway products, and after comparing several products, decided to use Kong.
With Kong as a single point for proxying and routing traffic across all its API endpoints, Yahoo! Japan has been able to centralize authentication and authorization functionalities. This allows its developers to eliminate redundant code writing for authentication and authorization for each API, saving several hours of work. The centralization also enables Yahoo! Japan to expose its APIs via Kong for discovery, making it easy for developers to find and call APIs. As part of its testing process, Yahoo! Japan uses Kongs canary release capabilities to reduce the risk of introducing new software into production. With canary releases, Yahoo! Japan slowly rolls out its changes to a small subset of users, providing time to evaluate potential issues before rolling it out fully in production. Since the Kong platform is responsible for routing all APIs, its availability is critical for service continuity. Kong provides high availability with built-in clustering capability to eliminate a single point of failure. Complementing this, Kongs circuit breaker functionality also improves the continuity of Yahoo! Japans services by detecting and detaching the broken backends and continuing the service with active backends. Additionally, Kongs multi-tenancy features have allowed Yahoo! Japan to realize safe operations by multiple teams without worrying about security regarding related tasks.
A true innovator, Yahoo! Japan is already looking ahead to further enhancements to its API platform. Our mission is to keep improving the productivity of our service development teams, and with Kong, we are confident that well be well-positioned to take advantage of future innovations, said Fukuda. Looking ahead, we are excited by the potential of using Kong with Kubernetes and in a service mesh pattern.
As enterprises move toward microservices, APIs must also evolve to support these new, modern architectures, said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. Kongs modern API platform enables Yahoo! Japan to not only deliver enhanced value to its customers much more quickly but also enrich its IT capabilities to better position itself to meet future business demands.
Briscola Inc. is a partner of Kong since 2016, providing products, technical support and related services to promote API-first solutions for the Japan market. With Kong Enterprise, our customers can build, deploy and manage APIs and microservices in a consistent way to accelerate the speed of service development and delivery, said Keitaro Suesada, chief executive officer of Briscola Inc. Additionally, our partnership with Kong enables us to deliver a better solution to Yahoo! Japan to help overcome the challenges of next-generation API infrastructures.
To learn more about Yahoo! Japans use of the Kong Enterprise platform, read thecase study.
About Kong
Kong delivers a next-generation API platform designed for modern architectures, including microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. Offering high flexibility, scalability, speed and performance, the open source platform enables developers and Global 5000 enterprises to reliably secure, connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for modern applications. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com/ or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.
About Briscola
Briscola Inc. provides API solutions and services to enable digital technologies including Big Data, IoT, AI and sensor cloud for a wide range of applications. As a digital business support for clients, it has a track record of microservice consultation, energy tech, health tech and so on.