With increasing users and transactions, GCash needed to scale its infrastructure while maintaining reliability and security. The team at GCash had been using Kong Gateway Community Edition for several years and while it had been a good fit for the organization in the past, they would need to evolve to support their future. As John Vincent Biscocho, Head of Infrastructure Management and Governance at GCash says, “We needed to achieve a more mature posture with our Kong infrastructure, and to do that, we needed to migrate to the enterprise version of Kong.”

With Kong Gateway Community Edition as the foundation of their new microservices architecture, GCash was able to implement a decentralized architecture while enforcing consistency and reliability. It also enabled GCash to incrementally expose legacy services as well-defined APIs and migrate them to microservices over time. The API gateway enforced security, rate limiting, and access control consistently across microservices, and Kong's plugin architecture allowed GCash to extend functionality as needed, like integrating authentication with internal identity systems.

However, the GCash team wanted the ability to partner with Kong’s professional services and support to help build the future of their API infrastructure. Biscocho and the team worked hand in hand with their Kong account team to understand the options available to them as they explored their new infrastructure requirements.

Since transitioning to Kong Enterprise, the GCash team has enjoyed remarkable success. Collaborating closely with Kong's professional services team, they embarked on a journey of discovery, transforming their traditional API model into a more streamlined APIOps approach. A pivotal element in launching their API Monetization program was establishing a centralized hub for monitoring and governing APIs, ensuring proper ingestion and adherence to predefined guidelines. Furthermore, they spearheaded a transformative initiative to reconfigure their infrastructure, resulting in an estimated monthly cost savings of $70,000. As GCash deconstructed its central monolithic infrastructure, the twin pillars of observability and governance assumed paramount importance. These factors are the cornerstone of upholding API standards and reducing redundant APIs across different teams.

Biscocho and his team at GCash also aspired to build an API Center of Excellence within GCash to support the organization’s accelerated growth. To achieve this, they have established learning and development as a crucial pillar for their technical teams. “Our internal technical resources must be equipped with both the skillset and the capabilities to support Kong as a product,” says Biscocho. To date, Kong has assisted 40 GCash Infrastructure engineers in completing both foundation and intermediate courses – a huge milestone in the team’s journey to creating an API COE.