As an organization driven to enrich the interconnectivity that exists between the development of quality products and delivering a top-notch experience for its users, Neha Jaiswal, Product Manager at Australia Post, and the API Platform & Central Services team regularly self-reflect on how they can continue building solutions that will provide sustained value for their customers over time.

As one facet of this initiative, it was determined that procuring a lightweight API gateway solution built with inherent scalability and ease of use would be vital for enabling Australia Post to maximize resource efficiency while continuing to support the rapid growth of its developer community.

Australia Post moved to replace its existing API gateway with Kong Gateway Enterprise's service connectivity platform in 2016. Among early results yielded with the platform, Australia Post was able to accelerate its product-led transformation by embedding automation across its critical business functions while also simplifying the maintenance of its API endpoints via Kong's extensible out-of-the-box configurations paired with Lua plugins.

Ultimately, by leveraging Kong Gateway Enterprise to unlock higher availability of its distributed services, Australia Post has been able to accelerate its development velocity while establishing a turnkey API ecosystem that has helped to stimulate further product innovation for its customers and resulting stakeholders.

"We are building a unified ecosystem of ready-to-use APIs that can be rapidly consumed into new innovative products while connecting our customers to solutions more effectively," said Jaiswal. "We know that APIs are the building blocks for data access and supporting vital business functions. By managing our APIs through Kong, we've transformed the way our business enables the rapid creation, scalability, and reusability of technology solutions across our enterprise."

By setting up a central layer of platform visibility via Kong Gateway Enterprise, Australia Post has been able to more accurately track incoming support requests and gather additional insights around its overall API usage. With this new data in hand, it became evident that automating tasks throughout the consumer onboarding lifecycle would be key to elevating developer productivity and further promoting API reusability across the organization.

"We currently have our development portal directly linked to Kong with about 100 APIs running through it. With our previous solution, it would take 5-10 days to onboard a consumer onto our developer platform now with the ease of automation achieved through Kong, we've been able to streamline our onboarding process down to just a few hours," Jaiswal shared.

"We've found that Kong can be easily deployed in our data centers, on-premise, and in dockerized containers, giving us a lot more flexibility to decentralize and govern our APIs," said Jaiswal.

With the majority of the organization already operating in AWS and GCP, and with many more teams looking to migrate their projects to the cloud in the near future, Kong Gateway Enterprise's deployment agnosticism has allowed Australia Post to avoid vendor lock-in while also effectively serving as a launchpad for the Australian postal service to decentralize its applications and enable teams to operate within their desired environment of choice.

Through leveraging this separation of concerns, Australia Post has gained the ability to assign teams to a set of specific fine-grained services in order to resolve business problems more practically and efficiently.

Following a successful transition to its decentralized architectural model, the next step in Australia Post's modernization roadmap was to enhance the overall security posture of its API landscape.

With OAuth2 supported out-of-the-box by Kong Gateway Enterprise, along with a number of other industry-standard authentication and authorization policies, Australia Post swiftly established a standardized framework for request authentication, cross-level authorization, proxying, and rate-limiting capabilities that have all contributed to Australia Post's developers now being able to allocate more of their time and resources to advancing the company's digital product portfolio.

"Kong's configurations allow our developers to focus on what matters most without having to be concerned with building the authorization logic Kong handles the authorization work for us on the backend," said Jaiswal. "While our previous solution did not support OAuth2, Kong has us covered for all of our authorization needs, from out-of-the-box OAuth2 to OpenID Connect and much more."