Yahoo! Japan Deploys Kong Enterprise API Platform to Improve Service Development Productivity

New platform centralizes API portfolio and improves the security, availability and performance of services

SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYO – September 13, 2018 – Kong Inc., the leading API platform for modern architectures, and Briscola Inc., the partner company of Kong since 2016, located in Tokyo, today announced that Yahoo! Japan has deployed Kong’s Enterprise API platform to improve productivity in service development for expanding its business.

Yahoo! Japan Corporation offers more than 100 web-based services, including search engine, auction, news, weather, sport, email and shopping. Yahoo! Japan is the undisputed market leader in terms of users and page views with more than 11 billion users and more than 70 billion page views each month. As a technology-driven company, innovation is at the core of Yahoo! Japan’s DNA. To maintain market leadership, Yahoo! Japan began transitioning to microservices to accelerate service development and deployment. Consequently, Yahoo! Japan needed a new API platform to centralize its portfolio of APIs and improve the security, availability and performance of its services. With its shift to microservices and an API-centric architecture, Yahoo! Japan needed more than just a gateway – it needed a true high-performance platform built for centralizing and managing APIs across a modern architecture.

“We moved rapidly towards microservices over the past few years, and we needed to centralize our APIs,” said Kanaderu Fukuda, senior manager of computing platform at Yahoo! Japan. “We began looking into API gateway products, and after comparing several products, decided to use Kong.”

With Kong as a single point for proxying and routing traffic across all its API endpoints, Yahoo! Japan has been 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 Yahoo! Japan to expose its APIs via Kong for discovery, making it easy for developers to find and call APIs. As part of its testing process, Yahoo! Japan uses Kong’s canary release capabilities to reduce the risk of introducing new software into production. With canary releases, Yahoo! Japan slowly rolls out its changes to a small subset of users, providing time to evaluate potential issues before rolling it out fully in production. 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 also improves the continuity of Yahoo! Japan’s services by detecting and detaching the broken backends and continuing the service with active backends. Additionally, Kong’s multi-tenancy features have allowed Yahoo! Japan to realize safe operations by multiple teams without worrying about security regarding related tasks.

A true innovator, Yahoo! Japan is already looking ahead to further enhancements to its API platform. “Our mission is to keep improving the productivity of our service development teams, and with Kong, we are confident that we’ll be well-positioned to take advantage of future innovations,” said Fukuda. “Looking ahead, we are excited by the potential of using Kong with Kubernetes and in a service mesh pattern.“

“As enterprises move toward microservices, APIs must also evolve to support these new, modern architectures,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Kong’s modern API platform enables Yahoo! Japan to not only deliver enhanced value to its customers much more quickly but also enrich its IT capabilities to better position itself to meet future business demands.”

Briscola Inc. is a partner of Kong since 2016, providing products, technical support and related services to promote API-first solutions for the Japan market. “With Kong Enterprise, our customers can build, deploy and manage APIs and microservices in a consistent way to accelerate the speed of service development and delivery,” said Keitaro Suesada, chief executive officer of Briscola Inc. “Additionally, our partnership with Kong enables us to deliver a better solution to Yahoo! Japan to help overcome the challenges of next-generation API infrastructures.”

To learn more about Yahoo! Japan’s use of the Kong Enterprise platform, read the case study.

About Kong

Kong delivers a next-generation API platform designed for modern architectures, including microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. Offering high flexibility, scalability, speed and performance, the open source platform enables developers and Global 5000 enterprises to reliably secure, connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for modern applications. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com/ or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.

About Briscola

Briscola Inc. provides API solutions and services to enable digital technologies including Big Data, IoT, AI and sensor cloud for a wide range of applications. As a digital business support for clients, it has a track record of microservice consultation, energy tech, health tech and so on.