Looking for a centralized platform to deliver key business results

As a large media and technology company, Sky Italia faced challenges around standardizing and managing its APIs.

While the team had an existing SOA Architecture in place, they realized that it would not allow them to deliver on the ambitious goals of creating a platform that would support all aspects of Sky’s revenue-generating business.

Without the ability to scale and move to a microservice architecture, the team needed to find a new solution that would allow them to be more efficient, reduce costs, and maintain low latency.

Creating a full API lifecycle suite of tools to implement APIOps

Sky chose Kong as its API management platform to support its new infrastructure built on the pillars of automation, observability, and performance. This infrastructure utilized Kong Enterprise’s deployment flexibility, running in hybrid mode to support both cloud and on-prem services.

They also used Kubernetes clusters and microservices, alongside an AWS Managed Observability Stack and IaC by policy to build a solution that is both highly scalable and has high availability.

By adding Kong plugins to extend the functionality of this architecture to include security, monitoring, transformation, and integration, the team has been able to implement simple logic directly on the gateway, saving effort and greatly broadening the scope of what Kong Enterprise can provide.

In order to implement APIOps methodology, the Sky team created a clear process to facilitate the rapid building and iteration of APIs through a combination of DevOps and GitOps.

“Through this new process, we have been able to reduce development time to enable fast usage and rapid testing as soon as the interface agreement is confirmed. This lets the team work much faster and more efficiently, to deliver quicker results to the broader organization,” says Spadaccini.

Seeing results for both technical teams and the larger business

Since first deploying Kong Enterprise, Sky Italia has seen impressive benefits and results. From a technical standpoint, they have increased performance by 70%, while maintaining 99.99% availability.

“One of our major goals in partnering with Kong was to be able to support our high volume of transactions, without losing any revenue through downtime. We have been able not only to meet, but exceed these goals,” says Spadaccini.

They have also reduced deployment time by 80%, allowing the team to build 200+ APIs designed and built through the APIOps with clear policies, increased testing, and greater consistency.

The broader business has also seen significant results since Sky began working with Kong.

The team has also achieved faster time-to-market, releasing new products and services 20% more quickly than before. This speed provides better experiences for customers across the board, while also producing new revenue streams for the business.

Changing minds and practices

The benefits that the Sky Italia team has seen since implementing Kong even extend past improvements in speed, availability, and cost savings. Spadaccini and the Integration team needed to fully reconceptualize their approach to APIs and their role in the tech stack.

“It took time to fully implement this new strategy,” says Spadaccini. “We had to build out not only the new architecture, which of course took time and effort, but we also needed to retrain ourselves in how we create and measure the APIs that we do have.” 

This mindset shift was assisted by developers on the team diving in and using Kong Enterprise. After trying out the new system and realizing how easy it was to use, they fully embraced the API lifecycle management and APIOps mindset.

“Now that we have a centralized platform and process for designing, building, and managing our API lifecycle, we have been able to change our entire company’s mindset around APIs. They are not an afterthought, but a core of our technology stack and foundational to our strategy,” says Spadaccini.