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Healthcare technology company trusts Kong to deliver innovation and scalability
Founded in 2014, League is a platform technology company powering next-generation healthcare consumer experiences. Payers, providers and consumer health partners build on League’s healthcare CX platform to deliver high-engagement, personalized healthcare experiences consumers love. With more than 70% of its members using the platform at least once per month to access, navigate and pay for care, League’s engagement rates remain amongst the highest in the industry.
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 League’s 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 League’s 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 Kong’s API gateway was built with NGINX under the hood – an industry-standard technology.”
Additionally, Kong’s 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 don’t have to carry any unnecessary plugins or features on the platform – Kong’s 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 League’s internal teams are leveraging Kong’s integration with Prometheus to access centralized monitoring and analytics. The extensibility of Kong’s platform has allowed League’s 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.
League’s healthcare CX platform runs primarily on Kubernetes. Through Kong’s Kubernetes-native support and true architectural flexibility provided across any cloud or protocol, Mendoza has confidence in Kong’s ability to support League’s current and future infrastructure use cases. Additionally, through Kong’s cloud-agnosticism, Mendoza’s team can expand into new cloud regions as needed to reduce operational overhead.
“We are currently running Kong across multiple cloud regions in GCP. Kong’s cloud-agnosticity helps us to be ready for what’s next – it is an invaluable asset that increases our readiness to expand to additional hosting options.”
Looking ahead, League plans to continue leveraging Kong’s extensibility to help strengthen the privacy of its customer data while also helping to decommission all remaining legacy complexity. “We’ve 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 Kong’s 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.
"Delivering a best-in-class healthcare consumer experience platform relies on a solid technical foundation. By using Kong as our API management solution, we're able to innovate and continuously improve our product, which means we can get the best digital experiences into our customers' hands faster." Raymond Mendoza VP Engineering at League
"Delivering a best-in-class healthcare consumer experience platform relies on a solid technical foundation. By using Kong as our API management solution, we're able to innovate and continuously improve our product, which means we can get the best digital experiences into our customers' hands faster."