To maintain its market leadership, LY Corporation began transitioning towards microservices to accelerate service development and deployment. Consequently, LY Corporation needed a new API platform to centralize its portfolio of APIs and to improve the security, availability, and performance of its services. 

“We moved rapidly towards microservices over the past few years, and we needed to centralize our APIs,” said Kanaderu Fukuda, senior manager of the Computing Platform Department at LY Corporation. “We began looking into API management products, and after comparing several products, decided to use Kong.”

As a technology-driven company, innovation is at the core of LY Corporation’s DNA. With its shift to microservices and an API-centric architecture, LY Corporation needed more than just a gateway – it needed a true, high-performance platform built for centralizing and managing APIs across modern architecture. 

“We began looking into API management products in the market, but we needed something we could build for the future with,” said Fukuda. “With Kong, we knew that we would get something that would work perfectly with our technology today and set us up for where we want to go. Kong allows us flexible deployment, easily integrates with all the technologies we use across the company, and gives us the flexibility we want to avoid vendor lock-in.” 

With Kong as a single point for proxying and routing traffic across all its API endpoints, LY Corporation was able to centralize authentication and authorization functionalities. This allows its developers to eliminate redundant code writing for authentication and authorization for each API, saving several hours of work. 

The centralization also enables LY Corporation to expose its APIs via Kong for discovery, making it easy for developers to find and call APIs. 

As part of its testing process, LY Corporation uses Kong’s canary release capabilities to reduce the risk of introducing new software into production. With canary releases, LY Corporation slowly rolls out its changes to a small subset of users, providing the time to evaluate potential issues before rolling it out fully in production. 

With more than 100 web services being delivered through the LY Corporation portal site, service development efficiency is critical to the company’s success. 

“My team focuses on delivering platform functionalities to accelerate the development and deployment of web services,” said Fukuda. “With hundreds of service development teams, we knew that an API gateway would allow us to save hundreds of hours of time writing redundant code.” 

With Kong’s plugin architecture, LY Corporation immediately enhanced its features around multi-tenancy, scalability, and security without adding unnecessary weight to its gateway.

To further improve development and operational efficiency, LY Corporation used Kong to enable Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). Before Kong, service development teams were often bottlenecked by the operational aspect of managing servers, but with FaaS, those tasks were eliminated. 

“We can’t use external public cloud services like other companies because our strict security standards would make the cost untenable. Instead, we are building our own platform to satisfy the standards,” Fukuda said. “Our FaaS is based on OpenWhisk, and with Kong, we’re able to enhance features around multi-tenancy and security without worrying about the related tasks. Kong and FaaS are the best choices for us because we can deploy on-premise, and it’s easy to integrate with the technologies we are using across the company.”

Since the Kong platform is responsible for routing all APIs, its availability is critical for service continuity. Kong provides high availability with built-in clustering capability to eliminate a single point of failure. 

Complementing this, Kong’s circuit breaker functionality improves the continuity of LY Corporation’s services by detecting and detaching the broken backends and continuing the service with active backends.