MediaMarktSaturn Reduces Costs 11x with Kong
Europe’s largest consumer electronics retailer migrated to Kong, implementing a federated model that led to developer satisfaction, 3x faster performance, and 75% API growth.
11x
cheaper
3x
faster
75%
growth of APIs under management
MediaMarkt Saturn is a German multinational chain of stores selling consumer electronics, with over 1,000 retail locations across 10 European countries. Through its integrated online and in-person experiences, it reaches millions of customers per day.
Transforming API management for Black Friday and beyond
MediaMarkt Saturn operates over 1,000 stores and also generates a significant portion of its revenue through e-commerce. In order to seamlessly integrate their systems to create a top-notch customer experience, they needed to evolve beyond the limitations of their previous API gateway.
In a session at API Summit 2025, Ervis Duraj, Principal Engineer, shared how he and the team transformed their approach to API management with Kong and a principle they call “SLS” - simple, lovable, and speed.
API management woes from centralized bottlenecks and latency
In 2023, Duraj and the MediaMarkt Saturn team had a problem. While they had gone live with their API gateway in 2018, they were now experiencing some significant challenges. Latency, click ops manual processes that prevented automation and scale, and a centralized bottleneck-inducing architecture were all hampering their API platform from being the efficient machine they knew it could be. With Black Friday coming up, meeting demands would require 30 machines to process the expected 200,000+ requests per second – an inefficient infrastructure setup. More than that, after three years, adoption rates remained disappointing, unable to support their API-first strategy or emerging AI foundation needs across 128 development teams.
After an RFP process that collected requirements from all stakeholders, including the various product teams, Enterprise Architecture, and Cyber Security, the MediaMarktSaturn team decided that Kong would be their next API management platform.
“Our philosophy has been: it doesn't have to be expensive to be good, but people must love to work with it to make it valuable. That's the core principle we operated by.”
Achieving success through SLS
MediaMarktSaturn implemented Kong through a three-pillar transformation strategy built on what Duraj calls the "SLS principle"—Simple, Lovable, Speed. The first pillar focused on their migration strategy, developing a comprehensive approach to moving their APIs without impacting customers, losing time, or losing all of the work they’ve done since 2018.
The second pillar addressed the need for a cultural shift, transforming "from a centralized approach to a federated model." This meant empowering 128 teams to run their own Kong gateways while maintaining centralized governance through APIOps repositories in GitHub containing manifests, secrets, Docker files, configuration, and documentation.
"If you give people what they want, without them needing to circumvent your company governance and making it hard to use, they will start using it. They might not even tell you! And since developers love automation, that is key to success.”
The third pillar drove continuous improvement by moving from ClickOps to APIOps. This automation-first approach eliminated manual processes and reduced onboarding time from weeks to hours, while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance.
The technical architecture deployed 410 APIs across three Google Cloud regions. External APIs route through Cloudflare while internal APIs use private Google load balancers. Critically, federated nodes process internal Kubernetes cluster traffic directly without hitting the central gateway, dramatically improving performance and cost efficiency.
“Is it resilient? Of course, because in this setup, if one gateway fails in one of the regions, that can be handled from another one and so on,” says Duraj.
Duraj's guiding philosophy captured the essence of the transformation: "a system doesn't have to be expensive to be good, but people must love to work with it to make it valuable."
This new system also sets up MediaMarktSaturn for the AI era. They now have a solid foundation for safely governing AI traffic, using their APIs and deploying through the same platform via Kong’s AI gateway.
11x cheaper, 3x faster, and 100% loved
This transformation has already delivered some pretty impressive results. MediaMarktSaturn has seen 11x cheaper costs, three times faster performance, and four times better adoption than their previous gateway. Most remarkably, they achieved 100% satisfaction from developers using the platform.
"In our first Black Friday with Kong, we hit 28 billion requests – 11 times cheaper and three times faster."
The infrastructure efficiency gains have also been significant. Their first Black Friday on Kong handled 200,000+ requests per second with just "three containers running in three regions without a scaling capability" compared to the previous 30 machines. Traffic scaled from 16 billion to 28 billion calls per month—originally a Black Friday spike but now "the new norm," according to Duraj.
Perhaps most telling was the 75% API growth as shadow APIs emerged from hiding. When developers had access to self-service automation that matched their workflow, they stopped circumventing corporate governance.
Duraj distilled three key lessons from their shift to Kong:
Prioritize developer experience as mandatory, not a luxury
Make strategic platform choices by asking if people love it
Cultivate a culture of speed through automation
As he emphasized, "if developers don't love it, your platform will not get adopted. You might get a wow effect, but if it's not used, it's not needed."
"Prioritize your developer experience. It's not a luxury. It's a mandatory thing to transform your API, your AI journey, or any journey related to technology because they have the power to make changes that make your customer happy."
MediaMarktSaturn's journey proves that APIs power AI foundations and business growth when built on simple, lovable, speedy principles—saving both time and money while empowering developers to make customers happy.
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