In the payments industry, APIs are mission-critical infrastructure. They're responsible for moving sensitive transaction data, orchestrating interactions between devices and backend systems, and enforcing security and compliance requirements at scale. Even minor disruptions can have a significant business impact, making reliability and consistency non-negotiable.

At Verifone, APIs sit at the center of a globally distributed commerce platform that spans payment terminals, merchant services, backend processing systems, and partner integrations. As the company modernized its architecture and adopted microservices, API traffic increased significantly, both in volume and in importance.

Verifone began using Kong Gateway in 2019, adopting it early as a standardized API gateway layer to manage traffic routing, security controls, and extensibility across services.

Initially, Kong solved a clear need by providing a flexible, high-performance gateway capable of supporting Verifone’s evolving microservices architecture. Over time, however, Kong became more than a traffic router. It evolved into a central operational control point for how APIs were deployed, secured, and managed across environments.

As API usage expanded across teams and regions, Verifone began to recognize that how APIs were configured and operated would matter just as much as the gateway itself.

In the early stages of Kong adoption, Verifone configured APIs using imperative, command-based workflows. Engineers interacted directly with Kong’s Admin API, issuing a series of calls to create services, routes, plugins, and consumers.

For a single microservice, onboarding an API required multiple discrete steps. Each change was applied incrementally, often without a clear picture of how it affected the overall configuration state.

This approach introduced several systemic challenges:

• Rollback complexity: Many Kong entities, particularly plugins, are identified by Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) that differ across environments. Rolling back a change required environment-specific scripts and careful sequencing, making reversions fragile and time-consuming.
• Limited visibility into changes: Imperative updates could overwrite existing configuration silently. Engineers often had no immediate indication that something had gone wrong until downstream systems or users reported issues.
• Operational overhead: When deployments failed, rollback procedures involved running long chains of scripts, increasing the risk of human error during already stressful situations.
• Reduced resilience: Small configuration mistakes could undermine reliability, especially problematic for payment flows that depend on predictable latency and consistent behavior.

For a global payments platform, this lack of safety and predictability was untenable. Verifone needed a way to make API changes observable, reversible, and repeatable without slowing down delivery teams.

To address these challenges, Verifone adopted declarative configuration using decK, Kong’s configuration management tool.

Rather than issuing individual updates, teams defined the desired state of Kong — services, routes, upstreams, targets, and plugins in a single configuration file. That file could then be synchronized atomically with the gateway.

This shift fundamentally changed how API changes were managed.

With declarative configuration, Verifone gained:

• Fail-fast validation: Using deck diff, teams could preview changes before deployment, seeing exactly what would be created, updated, or deleted.
• Versioned rollbacks: By tagging configurations, Verifone could roll back specific API versions without affecting unrelated services, an essential capability in a shared gateway environment.
• Faster recovery and bootstrapping: Entire Kong environments could be recreated quickly by dumping and reapplying configuration, improving resilience and reducing recovery time.

Verifone’s evolution from manual configuration to declarative, spec-first, and agent-assisted workflows produced tangible operational improvements.

• Increased reliability — Declarative syncs, diff-based validation, and versioned rollbacks significantly reduced configuration errors. Teams gained confidence that changes could be promoted or reverted safely, even under time pressure.
• Simplified onboarding — New engineers no longer needed deep Kong expertise on day one. Familiarity with OpenAPI specifications was enough to begin contributing, lowering the barrier to entry across teams.
• APIOps at scale — By codifying API configuration into CI/CD pipelines, Verifone achieved consistent behavior across environments. Manual steps were eliminated, and operational knowledge was embedded directly into tooling.
• Developer-friendly automation — The MCP-based chatbot demonstrated how AI could assist, not replace engineering workflows. Routine tasks like spec conversion and gateway syncs became faster and more accessible, without compromising governance.
• Future-ready architecture — With MCP, Verifone laid the groundwork for deeper automation, including integrations with version control systems and automated plugin management. The platform is now positioned to evolve alongside emerging agentic patterns.

Looking ahead

Verifone’s journey highlights a broader transformation underway in mission-critical industries. API platforms are no longer just about routing traffic, they are about enabling teams to move quickly without breaking trust.

By combining Kong Gateway, decK, spec-first design, and MCP-based automation, Verifone built an API operating model that balances control, resilience, and developer experience. The result is not only better API management today, but a platform ready for the next generation of AI-assisted software delivery.