Mercedes-Benz Connectivity Services is a digital company at its core. Modern vehicles provide valuable vehicle data, and the team develops and operates API products allowing to access data from Mercedes-Benz vehicles as well as interacting with them through command transmission to steer doors or electric vehicle battery preconditioning for instance. Hereby, the team is aware that the secure and responsible handling of data is the basis for the acceptance of services around connected driving and complies with data protection regulations when developing its products and solutions.

“Before we integrated Kong into our ecosystem, we had to deal with several challenges,” said Andreas Dannhauer, Mercedes-Benz Connectivity Services. “Routing requests in our microservice architecture was complex, even with sophisticated rules based on methods or regular expressions. Configuring our system according to state-of-the-art principles such as platform engineering and configuration as code was a daunting task. In addition, we used Kong Gateway to provide features such as rate limiting for HTTP requests in a very efficient way.”

Driven by a customer-centric approach, the team at Mercedes-Benz Connectivity Services has developed an end-to-end customer journey for their API products that puts the customer at the center of everything they do. It starts with the Mercedes-Benz [/developers portal](https://developer.mercedes-benz.com/)/developers portal, where customers can learn more about their products, understand how to integrate them into their digital business, and use them seamlessly. 

“With Kong as our trusted API gateway, we provide access to our API product, connect your business. All of this is achieved through lean and efficient digital processes that ensure that our entire journey from start to finish is truly digital,” Andreas Dannhauer said.

With the connect your business API, Mercedes-Benz Connectivity Services aims to create a holistic ecosystem for connected vehicles in collaboration with diverse partners. Through the API, third-party providers such as telematics companies and vehicle data software providers can seamlessly integrate Mercedes-Benz vehicle diagnostics and status data into their own products and business models with data protection always in mind. No retrofit solution is required, simplifying the process for all involved. This opens endless possibilities for the creation of innovative data-driven solutions.

Kong’s lightweight, fast, and flexible API gateway made a world of difference for the team at Mercedes-Benz Connectivity Services.

“The introduction of Kong brought benefits to our operations. Thanks to stateless provisioning and cloud-native configuration (using the Kubernetes Kong ingress controller), we became more efficient,” Andreas Dannhauer said. “Kong's powerful routing capabilities allowed us to decouple the APIs from the underlying microservice logic, giving us the flexibility to design and redesign our microservices with minimal disruption. The result? We were able to offer our customers a robust API design with an outstanding user experience that is not tied to our internal implementations.”

By embracing innovation, leveraging Kong, and putting the customer first, Mercedes-Benz Connectivity Services delivers unparalleled value to its customers.