Reza Shafii: Can you tell us about your role at BCG and how things have been going around your mandate? 

Surinderjit Sandhu: It’s been a busy few years at BCG and it's going to stay busy. Things are going well. We've had a big push into the cloud. We’ve really modernized how we build applications and how we architect applications for use within BCG. Part of that has been our container app dev platform that I’ll touch a bit more on in a moment. 

I work as part of our cloud platform portfolio. Our role is to support the use adoption of the cloud, support teams, how they build applications, support standards and really help us accelerate. I run our Platform Architecture CoE, and I have a team of architects that really work to support those goals. I think we’ve really been focused on development standards, accelerators, and building components and capabilities that let teams accelerate. We really want to take away all the pain and hard work from how teams have to do stuff to get something into production for any sort of enterprise is always a challenge. What we’re focused on is building those accelerators, and, as part of that, we built our app dev platform. Some of that is about modernizing how we build apps, applying guardrails, having a DevSecOps process as part of that. Building an API ecosystem has been very critical as well. We’ve gone from a small amount of API traffic to now being API-first. API-first is now the standard of how our apps are built and how our systems communicate. That’s been a massive change and also a key part of the accelerator at BCG.

Reza: As a platform team, tell me a bit about how you think about the different life cycle of application development - the teams you serve.

Surinderjit: What we want to do is get teams to be able to build apps as fast as possible without having to worry about all the plumbing, the governance and security standards around that. For us, it’s really providing a runway for teams to be able to build apps to a certain standard, publish them onto our platforms, and get them into production as fast as possible. As part of that, we built out an app dev platform - container based that’s wrapped with all sorts of tooling, monitoring, an onboarding and training process for teams to leverage those apps. Sometimes teams don’t need to know the ins and out of how things are specifically working. As long as they’re aligned to our standards, then they’re going to be successful in terms of using our platforms.

Reza: And how about the running and the governance cycle of it?

Surinderjit: We’ve built a lot of monitoring and governance in terms of how apps can be run and are run. We try to make that as lightweight as possible for the development teams. Running apps with high scalability, reliability and resilience is a combination of our platform team that basically builds and runs our app dev platforms. We have our two teams that monitor those systems. The application teams as well have a responsibility in terms of monitoring and understanding what’s going on in their applications running on the platform. It’s a combined effort. We have a responsibility model and different people and teams play a different part of that overall success.

Reza: BCG and Kong have worked together for over four years. How has Kong helped you on this journey?

Surinderjit: Kong is our standard API gateway for internal applications at BCG. We’ve baked that into our actual app dev platform. It’s part of our development process, part of our deployment and run process. For teams deploying applications, they essentially follow our patterns and their APIs get published through a governance and a security process, and then available for consumption. Kong has been great because it has a plug-in ecosystem and lets you develop your own custom plug-ins. We’ve really utilized that to bake in those security standards around how APIs can be consumed and reused across BCG.

Reza: You’ve also recently started adopting Konnect. Tell us about that.

Surinderjit: Moving to Konnect for us was really about reducing overhead, in terms of managing Kong instances. We’ve got a large number of Kong instances - some are shared, some are dedicated for specific use cases based on governance and security requirements. Konnect is providing us a control plane view across all of these instances of Kong we’re using across BCG, so we like it from that perspective. It’s also reduced our management overhead of Kong running on our platform, which we also like as well. 

Reza: Do you use some of the capabilities around analytics and troubleshooting?

Surinderjit: Absolutely. That’s really been a key part. Being able to see the metrics in one place and providing access to development teams to be able to see those as well - we’re always getting teams to be self-service as much as possible. 

Reza: AI is the topic of the decade. What does the intersection of AI and APIs look like from your perspective? 

Surinderjit: AI is the hottest topic right now. We’re working on a whole range of projects within BCG. It doesn’t fundamentally change how you build applications, APIs are still there and traffic between different parts of your AI system may be API based. We’re working on building AI enablement platforms to let our engineering teams build the right AI solutions and to let our teams operate more efficiently and effectively. We’re looking to see how we can leverage Kong as part of that journey as well. We’re excited to see what Kong is releasing in terms of its AI API gateway roadmap.