Despite having a robust API gateway in place, Elsevier’s API teams encountered multiple challenges during onboarding, which made the process inefficient, slow, and error-prone. Developers needed to learn how to publish APIs on Kong and understand complex plugin configurations for security, rate limiting, and quotas. The manual steps involved in onboarding also made it time consuming and inconsistent across teams. As a result, it became difficult to enforce API governance and collect reliable analytics.

To overcome these challenges, Elsevier introduced APIOps, a framework coined internally to automate API publishing and streamline developer onboarding using Kong. The team created a codebase that automates the full publishing process—from validating OpenAPI specs to deploying declarative configurations to Kong via its Admin API. Using Kong’s decK, Portal CLI, and Insomnia CLI, Elsevier was able to automate the transformation of OpenAPI specs into Kong configurations.

Elsevier also developed a novel "features" system which allows API teams to define plugin configurations like OAuth, rate limiting, and upstream security directly within their API workspace repositories. This makes it easy for developers to configure APIs with the right settings without needing to be experts in Kong’s architecture. 

The publishing process is fully integrated into the team’s CI/CD pipeline. A pull request triggers a dry run to generate all necessary configuration files without deploying them. Once merged, the pipeline executes a full deployment, pushing the generated files to Kong’s control plane. Teams are notified via Slack of publishing success or failure, improving transparency and responsiveness.

The implementation of APIOps led to measurable improvements in both efficiency and visibility:

• - 66% Faster Onboarding: API onboarding time was reduced from three days to just one day, significantly accelerating time-to-market.

• - Improved Developer Experience: Automation removed the need for developers to manually learn Kong configurations, making onboarding smoother and less error-prone.

• - Enhanced API Governance: Standardized validation and deployment ensured governance rules were consistently enforced.

• - Comprehensive Analytics: Elsevier now has better visibility into API consumption, enabling data-driven monetization strategies across the platform.