To extend its trading platform accessibility into new markets, Marco Polo required a network workload that could scale into the hundreds of thousands of independent nodes, with each node capable of handling millions of transactions in an automated fashion.

To address this technological imperative, Craig Ferguson, Chief Architect at Marco Polo Network, and the engineering team of globally distributed engineers set out to transition the companys architecture into an API-first model.

Looking ahead, the Marco Polo Network team determined that adding an API gateway to its infrastructure stack would be a critical move to allow the company to optimize for development velocity while simplifying its operations.

Without an API gateway in place, our business would have seen a rise in development costs as a direct result of the complexity that our team would have had to take on ourselves, Craig recounted.

Following its evaluation of third-party service connectivity providers, Craig and his team handpicked Kongs API gateway to become a fundamental building block of Marco Polo Networks global platform.

The Marco Polo Network has predominantly been a hosted network running on Microsoft Azure Cloud. However, with Kongs service connectivity platform being both cloud and identity provider (IdP) agnostic, Marco Polo Networks customers can now develop and deploy their services across any environment of choice.

This architectural freedom has played a key role in allowing the Marco Polo Network team to insulate its platform against future shifts in the technology market while also supporting a wide variety of customer-dictated IdPs and helping customers to leverage the trade finance platform to its fullest extent moving forward.

Kong has enabled us to abstract our platform from several integration patterns which were required to address specific customer needs, said Craig. This ability to separate our core product for customer-specific patterns has allowed us to integrate faster and deploy quicker, resulting in 20% reduction in deployment time across all of our integration patterns. We can also now support 100% of our customers with this solution, which, was not possible before implementing Kong.

Marco Polo Network is using Kubernetes heavily at the infrastructure layer to ensure operational consistency and service scalability. With the option to have a single Kong deployment per Kubernetes cluster that supports hundreds of independent platforms, the Marco Polo Network has been able to significantly simplify its Kubernetes deployment patterns and the overall manageability of each cluster while recapturing development time and resources.

Kongs plug-in architecture has allowed Marco Polo Network to present customers with a set of dynamic and controllable network capabilities from both the perspective of the UI and the API.

The extensibility of these plug-ins has played a crucial role in helping the Marco Polo Network team support numerous customer security and authentication requirements. This also helps to ensure that value is being delivered to the customer on demand and without reliance on third-party timelines such as vendor release cycles.

With Kong, we can integrate with several back-end systems in a way that is so much easier than any of the other alternatives we tried. Kong has allowed us to accelerate our product development cycle, and is now a key part of our growing stack of third-party software that we are using to future-proof the Marco Polo Network, said Shane.