The SaaS Hangover: How convenience created dependency
For the past decade, the answer to almost every enterprise software question has been the same: Put it in the cloud. Buy it as SaaS. Let somebody else worry about it. It was convenient. It was fast. And, most of the time, it made perfect sense. But convenience has a habit of becoming a dependency. […]
Build the crane
We signed a new customer recently, because their own customer demanded API access to their platform…
Read-only agents are still a data leak
“It can’t mutate prod” isn’t the same as “it can’t hurt us.” That’s the line I want platform teams to print out and tape somewhere near the Kubernetes dashboard before the next wave of agent demos arrives with a cheerful chat box and suspiciously broad permissions. CNCF recently promoted a walkthrough for running a Kubernetes-aware […]
If you can’t revoke your agent, you don’t have autonomy – you have unattended traffic
If your agent can’t be revoked, it isn’t autonomous. It’s unattended. That is the bit I think we are politely talking around while the “AI gateway” confetti cannon goes off in the background. And to be clear, I’m not dismissing the risk. Quite the opposite. I think the risk is real. I just don’t think […]
Remember Consignia? No. That’s the point.
In a market you didn’t create, your clever new vocabulary isn’t an asset. It’s a liability.
Two Roman horses decided your tech stack
This week one of my team asked for help. A big enterprise, trying to pick one API management platform. And a group inside is still defending a platform first built more than twenty years ago.
German Ciphers, Telegrams and Data Sovereignty
In January 1917, Germany sent a secret telegram. It went to Mexico. The offer: join the war against the United States, and you can have Texas, Arizona and New Mexico back. The Germans were careful and they put it in cipher. However, their own transatlantic cables had been cut, so they sent it the only […]
We hired an agent. It onboarded like everyone else.
In 1935, the US Army held a fly-off to choose its next bomber. Boeing turned up with the Model 299. It was the clear favourite. Bigger, faster, carried more than anything else on the field. The contract was as good as signed. On the demo flight, it took off, climbed, stalled, and crashed in a […]
You can’t scale advanced technologies on fragile foundations
Whether it’s autonomous agents or large language models, AI innovations don’t exist in a vacuum. They sit directly on top of your existing API infrastructure. So if your API management is shaky, your AI strategy will be too. Managing APIs in a global enterprise requires more than just a gateway, it requires a commitment to […]
Imagine, build, share – how integration testing led me to create the Tyk mock MCP server
“The right tool for this doesn’t exist. Let’s build one. Then let’s share it.”