Similar to what leading brands such as Shopify or Salesforce have accomplished in their respective industries, Raymond Mendoza, VP Engineering at League, and his team are striving to build the de-facto digital infrastructure for healthcare. To scale Leagues healthcare CX platform offering and expose these offerings in a standardized way to more customers and partners, Mendoza acknowledged that this would require League to significantly bolster its underlying API infrastructure. To achieve this, the search began for a modern API gateway that would enable League to leverage modularity and interoperability as its infrastructure rapidly evolved.

As we looked to support massive customer growth, we needed to have the ability to extend the platform in a variety of ways to enable interoperability. With these modularity implications, we needed something that would allow us to abstract away all shared concerns between the various applications we have on the backend. This would allow us to reduce duplication and allow teams to work more productively, said Mendoza.

Following an extended vendor evaluation, Mendoza deemed Kong's API gateway as an ideal fit for Leagues modernization plans. We had been aware of Kong as an industry leader in API management for several years now, said Mendoza. We immediately liked that Kongs API gateway was built with NGINX under the hood an industry-standard technology.

Additionally, Kongs simplicity and lightweight architecture has helped League to automate its CI/CD workflows and accelerate the developer onboarding process. Simplicity is one of the top reasons Kong stands out from the pack. Given the lightweight nature of Kong, we dont have to carry any unnecessary plugins or features on the platform Kongs plugin architecture allows us to use only what we need, when we need it. Kong also allows us to easily integrate with our CI/CD pipeline. Its support of declarative configurations has allowed our developers to use our code base as a single source of truth for all new changes and updates, shared Mendoza.

On its quest to provide customers with a cohesive, omnichannel healthcare experience, League looked into refactoring its backend systems. Doing this would provide its internal teams with the autonomy to build and scale services independently. Success is measured in our ability to spin up new backend services swiftly and securely, said Mendoza. With Kong providing us with the flexibility and extensibility to move away from our monolith and spin up new services independently, our teams can move faster and scale different parts of our system without bottlenecks.

Many of Leagues internal teams are leveraging Kongs integration with Prometheus to access centralized monitoring and analytics. The extensibility of Kongs platform has allowed Leagues product teams to align shared concerns and gain further autonomy in their workflows. Kong unlocks autonomy for our team by providing alignment across all shared concerns, including security filters, authentication and analytics. This is a must-have, as our product teams are rapidly doubling, and the overhead would have otherwise caused a lot of friction without a solution like Kong in place, said Mendoza.

Leagues healthcare CX platform runs primarily on Kubernetes. Through Kongs Kubernetes-native support and true architectural flexibility provided across any cloud or protocol, Mendoza has confidence in Kongs ability to support Leagues current and future infrastructure use cases. Additionally, through Kongs cloud-agnosticism, Mendozas team can expand into new cloud regions as needed to reduce operational overhead.

We are currently running Kong across multiple cloud regions in GCP. Kongs cloud-agnosticity helps us to be ready for whats next it is an invaluable asset that increases our readiness to expand to additional hosting options.

Looking ahead, League plans to continue leveraging Kongs extensibility to help strengthen the privacy of its customer data while also helping to decommission all remaining legacy complexity. Weve used Kong to enhance the security of our applications by rate limiting all of our APIs and leveraging API keys on specific use cases. We will also be integrating our identity provider with Kongs OpenID Connect plugin. This will allow us to decommission a lot of legacy complexity and focus on our core capabilities. Overall, Kong has allowed our healthcare platform to remain highly secure as we rapidly scale, shared Mendoza.