BMW’s engineering legacy is built on precision, reliability, and performance, and in the digital era, that commitment extends far beyond the vehicle itself. Every modern BMW is a “rolling computer,” as Oliver Heinze, Product Owner, Connected Company, said during his talk at Kong’s API Summit 2025.

“Our job at Connected Company is to make sure your car is connected and your My BMW or My MINI app is always working,” Heinze said. “If you preheat your car on a cold morning or update your navigation maps, all of that runs through our backend infrastructure.”

That backend is massive, supporting more than 24 million connected vehicles, powering critical functions like infotainment, over-the-air updates, and remote vehicle commands. Every driver interaction, from checking charge status to activating climate control, depends on seamless, secure API communication.

As the number of connected cars and digital touchpoints grew, the scale and complexity of BMW’s systems compounded multifold. What once worked as a robust, centralized platform was now curbing the company’s ability to innovate and respond to demand in real time.

BMW’s Connected Drive infrastructure had a heavy reliance on a centralized, on-prem API gateway. It had served the company well enough for years, delivering reliability and predictability. However, it was increasingly falling short in terms of the pace and scale of modern mobility.

“It was a very robust setup,” Heinze said. “We had almost no downtime. Everything was plannable, but it wasn’t fast.”

Scaling required extensive planning and resources. When temperatures dropped across Europe or North America, millions of users simultaneously preheated their cars. The surge in requests could spike API traffic overnight.

“We needed to size our infrastructure for those moments,” Heinze said. “But that’s not scalable in minutes; it’s scalable in months.”

The central gateway also created a single point of failure. If one system went down, it could affect multiple connected services at once. And maintaining uptime across data centers was expensive.

Rather than simply migrating the old gateway to the cloud, Heinze’s team reimagined API management completely.

“We asked our architects to come up with something new, something bold,” Heinze said. “They locked themselves in a room for two weeks and came back with an idea that was completely crazy. That’s how revolutions start.”

That idea became BMW’s fully decentralized API gateway model, powered by Kong.

Instead of one central gateway, BMW distributed API management across its ecosystem. Today, each of its 140 internal IT products operates its own API gateway. This shift eliminated bottlenecks, improved resilience, and gave product teams control over their own deployments.

“There’s no longer one single API gateway for us,” Heinze said. “Every product team runs its own. Everyone can deploy and service their own API gateway. It’s not even a full-time job; it’s something you can do as part of your normal development work.”

This decentralization instantly improved reliability.

“If one gateway fails, who cares?” Heinze said with a grin. “It’s only one microservice affected, not the whole Connected Drive.”

To maintain consistency across so many teams, BMW automated governance within its GitHub CI/CD pipelines. Every API specification is validated before deployment. If an API doesn’t comply with BMW’s security or design standards, it simply doesn’t go live. This automation also helped scale security posture and observability.

BMW’s decentralized gateway initiative delivered immediate, measurable improvements across its connected vehicle ecosystem.

• 50% reduction in operational costs compared to the legacy system

• Latency cut in half, from 200ms to 95ms per request

• 24 release cycles per year, up from three — keeping infrastructure continuously updated

• Zero downtime throughout the migration period

• Seamless driver experience, with no visible service interruptions

“Your car now preheats faster than before,” Heinze said. “You probably didn’t notice it, but we did and that’s the best kind of success.”

Beyond performance, the initiative reshaped BMW’s culture of software engineering. Each product team now owns its APIs, enabling a developer-centric model with shared governance and full autonomy.

“Everyone can work in their own cycles,” Heinze said. “You can move as fast or as slow as you want. We’ve built speed without chaos.”

The transformation also established a modern, distributed foundation for the company’s growing portfolio of AI-driven services.

Heinze closed his talk with the perspective of a technologist proud of both the result and the process.

“We called it an overnight revolution, and that’s what it was. We prepared for a year to shine in seven weeks. And the best part? Nobody noticed.”

BMW’s Connected Company redefined how a global enterprise can modernize its digital backbone. By decentralizing API management with Kong, the company achieved faster releases, improved reliability, and developer autonomy — all while delivering seamless digital experiences to millions of drivers worldwide.

“It wasn’t just an upgrade,” Heinze said. “It was a revolution that empowered our API developers and accelerated sheer driving pleasure.”