During her session at API Summit 2025, Radhi Atukuri, Senior Architect at Vanguard, shared how the company transformed operational complexity into fully orchestrated, resilient systems, turning the security team from vocal critics into its strongest advocates.

Atukuri underscored the scale Vanguard operates at, managing $11.3 trillion in assets for 50 million investors who expect their money to be available “no questions asked.” Vanguard is client-owned, meaning the organization is accountable to both clients and owners, she said. This is why Vanguard takes a long-term approach to everything it does, including its technology investments.

Over time, the team at Vanguard saw steady growth in Kong use cases as teams increasingly relied on the gateway for authentication and routing.

To illustrate the developer experience, Atukuri introduced a persona named "Dave," a senior developer navigating fragmented tooling, lengthy manual configurations, and frequent troubleshooting. Many developers began their day anticipating some percentage of deployment failures.

"The tech stack was diverse, and each application required a different approach to configure Kong," Atukuri said.

"Dave" thought there should be a better way.

At enterprise scale, Atukuri said it was like "having 400 master chefs in one kitchen, each having their own secret recipe. The food might be great, but it was challenging to coordinate with dinner service."

The solution would be, she emphasized, not eliminating flexibility, but orchestrating it.

Atukuri described Deck Launch as a custom-built Vanguard solution.

“Think of it like Kong decK got an MBA degree,” Atukuri said.

Deck Launch was built on proven solutions. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Atukuri’s team wanted the wheels to work better together.

The magic happened in the integration layer where GitHub Actions met Kong decK and the governance layer made sure it all worked fine together.

“We have preserved every bit of flexibility while adding consistency that enterprises desperately need,” Atukuri said, explaining that the approach eliminated many “it depends on your setup” deployment challenges.

One of the most significant design decisions was centralizing ~90% of configuration, simplifying complex plugins and reducing redundancy across hundreds of applications.

Application teams could focus on business logic instead of gateway mechanics. To operationalize the model, the team at Vanguard implemented a three-tier governance structure spanning application teams, a central orchestration layer, and the Kong platform itself, embedding controls directly into delivery workflows.

“The progression from complex to orchestrated — that’s not marketing speak. That’s our first-hand experience,” Atukuri said.

Atukuri's team built momentum through early proof to expansion.

• Phase 1: Foundation and pilot — The first 30 days focused on environment setup, template creation, and a small pilot group. The goal was to prove that a real application could deploy successfully through the new pipeline.
• Phase 2: Scaling and refinement — Once the pipeline demonstrated value, additional teams were onboarded. Feedback informed refinements, and internal advocacy began to grow organically.
• Phase 3: Optimization and expansion — With momentum established, Vanguard expanded the model, introduced advanced features, and prepared for broader enterprise rollout.

“What I love about this approach is that we see measurable results in 30 days, not 30 months,” Atukuri said, emphasizing the importance of early wins in overcoming skepticism. The momentum helped accelerate adoption while minimizing resistance, allowing the platform to scale without heavy enforcement.

According to Atukuri, the transformation resulted in a 70% reduction in deployment time, shrinking processes that once took three hours down to roughly 45 minutes.

Financially, Vanguard saved approximately $2.4 million annually by reducing repetitive developer work across more than 400 applications, a figure Atukuri described as conservative because it excluded avoided incidents and failed deployments.

Yet Atukuri emphasized that the most meaningful outcome wasn’t purely operational.

“The most telling metric isn’t technical; teams are reporting higher satisfaction because their time is being well spent solving real business problems rather than fighting deployment tools,” Atukuri said.

Security teams also evolved from critics to advocates once governance became embedded into pipelines.

“When developers start talking about the governance model in positive terms, nothing is better than that,” Atukuri said.

Deck Launch represents only the first phase of Vanguard’s platform evolution. Atukuri said that the organization is now exploring AI-driven capabilities to further enhance configuration management and governance.