As an insurance broker, the team at TIDLOR faced many tech challenges, including integrating with multiple insurers and external systems, ensuring security and regulatory compliance, managing system load effectively, and maintaining a high-performance platform — all while supporting rapid development, innovation, and a strong customer experience. 

They were looking to reduce operational complexity, improve performance and security, and accelerate API integration for new business initiatives, which led them to Kong.

For platform engineer Athapornpong Phudphol and the team at TIDLOR, the value that Kong and an improved API strategy could bring to the organization was clear.

• Security and compliance: Ensuring trust, data protection, and adherence to regulatory standards are paramount.

• Platform resilience: Maintaining high availability and consistent performance under varying loads is essential for business continuity.

• Developer productivity: Streamlining development workflows accelerates innovation and time-to-market for new features.

These would all come together to support big-picture business objectives well beyond the platform team.

"Our API strategy underpins core business objectives by delivering a secure, scalable platform and accelerating the rollout of new features — directly supporting time-to-market goals and overall business performance," Phudphol said. "We leverage Kong as a core component of our APIOps strategy, utilizing it to streamline API operations and support our business outcomes." 

Key capabilities Kong offered include:

• Deployment automation and version control: Ensures rapid and reliable API rollouts with minimal human error.

• Automated testing: Integrates seamlessly into our CI/CD pipeline to maintain quality and consistency.

• Security policy enforcement: Centralizes access control and threat protection to safeguard our platform.

• Infrastructure tenant control and migration: Simplifies management and scaling of our multi-tenant environments.

"These features collectively drive operational efficiency, reduce risks, and accelerate our time-to-market, directly contributing to overall business success," Phudphol said. 

With Kong, the team at TIDLOR has been able to maintain high availability and consistent performance under varying loads — an essential for business continuity. 

They've reduced overall system downtime by leveraging rate limiting and HTTP logging. And they've optimized response times by ensuring any breach attempts are detected and contained within seconds.

"We rely heavily on several key elements of Kong — observability, rate-limiting, HTTP logging, and security enforcement. These features are indispensable because they eliminate redundant functions, reduce downtime, and ensure robust API governance,” says Phudphol. "Since adopting Kong, our team has seen dramatic improvements in system reliability and operational efficiency, allowing us to quickly monitor, manage, and scale our API ecosystem while maintaining stringent security standards."

Streamlining the development workflows has also accelerated innovation and time-to-market for new features. The team has been able to minimize deployment errors, leading to a reduction in API downtime caused by deployment issues. They have also automated as much of their API management as possible to decrease manual efforts.

Using Kong has delivered significant bottom-line impacts for TIDLOR, including:

• Accelerated Infrastructure Upgrades: Migrated their tenant and microservices platform with near-zero downtime, reducing the expected migration timeline.

• Enhanced Scaling and Performance: Leveraged Kong's canary plugin and upstream target load balancing to scale infrastructure seamlessly, ensuring robust performance under variable loads.

What's next? Over the next year, the TIDLOR team will focus on standardizing partner integration APIs to expand their network of partners.