While Brittany Ferries has historically been in the business of transporting people and cargo across the sea, its API management needs are decidedly modern.

Gildas Pouliquen, API Manager, and Eric Bustarret, Head of Architecture, are responsible for the management of data flow and communication between their APIs and Applications. They realized that as their business grew, they needed a centralized API management system that worked with their legacy SOAP APIs but also brand-new REST APIs.

The solution had to be API-first software in order to comply with a fully automated approach architecture in place at Brittany Ferries.

They turned to their partner Vincent Guiheneuc, CEO of Bravenn, to recommend a platform that could help solve their API challenges. Guiheneuc pointed them to Kong Konnect as a cloud-native SaaS API platform that could support the kind of modernized architecture they were looking to build.

"Bravenn has worked with Kong on a number of projects, so when the team at Brittany Ferries came to me asking for a full API management solution which had to be very powerful yet simple to maintain it was a no-brainer to recommend Konnect," says Guiheneuc.

Since Brittany Ferries was already using GCP as their cloud provider and was fully deployed on Kubernetes, its goals around Konnect were focused on setting up Kong Gateways and the management control plane.

Bustarret and Pouliquen worked with Bravenn as a deployment partner to build out the full CI/CD automation chains that would help streamline API development, as well as create a DevPortal that would allow for publishing both new and existing APIs.

"We were very pleased by how fast and straightforward the deployment process was with Bravenn's expertise. Konnect could have even been deployed in a matter of days. It took us longer because of the implementation of the full automation chains which was dependent on the availability of our own internal resources," says Pouliquen.

One of the main goals of Brittany Ferries was better efficiency in their API development and usage process.

"We have seen a great increase in our teams efficiency as a result of using Konnect. Our front-end developers can do their onboarding simply by using the DevPortal," says Pouliquen.

This ability to provide autonomy and greater efficiency, while still providing the teams with guardrails, is a key feature of Konnect and a critical piece of Brittany Ferries deployment model.

In addition, by implementing an API management platform, Brittany Ferries has allowed their business customers, including freight companies and regulatory bodies such as customs, to be more autonomous by using externally available APIs.

With ever-expanding new business lines, the ability to deploy more APIs that conform to the established standards is an important way the API and broader Architecture team at Brittany Ferries support the company's growth.

Pouliquen, Bustarret, and the Brittany Ferries team were also looking to centralize their API security. Indeed, cargo and passenger data are sensitive and subject to GDPR. Brittany Ferries APIs need to be opened to the external world in a very secure manner. Kong Konnect with its extensive security plugins library available at a click of a button made this API architecture very robust and gave the operational teams complete observability.