BT Group will adopt the “Kong Konnect” platform to bring together its fragmented API environments in a major win for the US company.
BT plans to introduce a “federated approach to centralise its API management on one platform, enhance governance, and establish a self-service model for developers to manage APIs independently.”
So it said in a press release Tuesday – with BT’s move to centralise API management coming as it continues to grapple with a complex IT modernisation programme that has seen its digital leaders publicly lament the fact that their “legacy” IT spend alone is £600 million yearly.
(Previous CDIO Harmeen Mehta told The Stack that she was targeting a 70% cut in OpEx merely by taking mainframe workloads to the cloud and the telco had trimmed 2,400 apps down to around 1,900 by late 2023.)
Abhijit Dasgupta, who works on “digital enablement architecture” at BT Group said in a canned statement. “Kong will not only allow us to work more efficiently, but they will provide us the infrastructure needed to better govern our APIs. We’re excited to work together on delivering better experiences for our developers and customers."
Kong CTO Marco Palladino earlier told The Stack that many organisations are looking to “bring APIs into core platform teams; they want developers to be users of infrastructure, not builders of infrastructure;we see real centralisation of that API practice in platform teams…”
Modular, microservice-based systems can comprise hundreds of individual services communicating with each other via APIs. They are typically designed to scale services independently according to load; something that can be done through API gateways like, yes, Kong’s…
Palladino claims: “Before microservices APIs were almost an afterthought.
“An organisation would have a monolithic application, then they would build a mobile app: 'Oh, we need an API to connect these new mobile apps with our back end'. So they would go ahead and build API's on top of their monolithic applications,” he told us last year: “With microservices, that mindset shifted. API's are not an afterthought anymore. API's are there since Day #1, because you need an API to be able to build a micro service-oriented architecture that can scale. It's all about API's.”
(Other “cloud-native” API platforms competing with Kong in this space include the likes of Solo, whilst others are looking to go pure OSS.)
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