Bo Linddahl Rasmussen, Head of App and API Platforms at Vestas, wanted to empower a diverse group of internal stakeholders across the company. This included the development teams, data teams, field technicians, and the Power Solutions team.

While Rasmussen's team had API management experience, their tools and platforms were geared toward supporting use cases that were either strictly on-premises or strictly cloud-based. Many of Vestas' internal teams were adopting hybrid use cases — applications that run both on-premise and in the cloud.

The Vestas API platform team began their search for a modern API management solution that could offer the flexibility needed to support their new hybrid architectural requirements.

"Our priority was to establish a flexible and lightweight enterprise-grade API management platform that could support multi-cloud and hybrid use cases with a lower cost of maintenance," Rasmussen said.

Kong Gateway Enterprise provided the Vestas team with exactly this — an API gateway with the ability to be deployed across any architecture, in the cloud or on-premise. Given the variety of use cases the Vestas API platform team supports, this was critical for the organization.

"Our team saw that Kong supported multi-cloud, hybrid, on-premises, and much more. We especially liked how with Kong, we only needed one configuration database, giving us much more flexibility," said Anuj Pandey, integration architect at Vestas. "Kong provides a lightweight API gateway that is very easy to install, operate, and maintain. We've found this to be key as we progress on our application modernization journey."

The Vestas team has been able to support their desired hybrid cloud model with Kong. The team has built a layered system with Kong, where the gateway resides in the cloud and routes to gateways on-premises.

"We have a synchronized configuration between on-premise, cloud, and Kubernetes," Pandey said. "Kong allows us to meet modern architectural requirements while supporting our legacy environments."

As a data-centric company with a growing catalog of more than 100 APIs, Vestas explored strategies for reducing its data latency and improving compliance. Through Kong's native integration with Kubernetes, Vestas has been able to deploy Kong directly next to each API further to optimize the performance and resilience of its API traffic.

"We wanted an API gateway that could protect our APIs and provide a scalable platform," Rasmussen said. "We had amassed many large data sets, which we then analyzed to help our customers who were interested in buying turbines to design their power plants. However, our teams were searching for better methods to access data from modern architectures like Kubernetes. Kong was the perfect match to provide a robust, secure, and scalable API platform."

Vestas has been able to remove many of its data silos while improving on its ability to get the data they need when they need it.

With Kong, Vestas has enhanced its authentication capabilities while gaining greater visibility of all integration points across the enterprise today.

"We make use of Kong's out-of-the-box plugins for authentication like JWT and OpenID Connect as well as have monitoring in place. With Kong, we have visibility and transparency for each API," Pandey said. "We have better visibility of API transactions and improved traceability, and this helps our team to have a greater understanding of our API usage across the organization so that we can further optimize performance."

Looking ahead, Vestas continues to evaluate areas of opportunity to improve team efficiency, resilience, and agility through the power of APIs. This includes plans for building a custom API catalog for exposing APIs externally and internally.

"Our next planned initiative will be to further develop our custom API catalog based on Kong," Pandey said. "External customers will be able to log in, see APIs they have bought, and use an API key to access API products and build apps themselves."

Vestas sees the potential to use Kong and APIs to transform the nature of its relationship with customers and partners.

"We have a lot of valuable data we are exposing to our internal developer and application teams," Rasmussen said. "The vision is to eventually make this data available externally to our customers as well."

"With thousands of turbines across the world, we also see the potential for someday deploying Kong at the edge," Rasmussen said. "Because Kong is lightweight enough to even run on our turbines themselves, we could eventually extend our sensing and data collection capabilities even further."