The tech market has never been more competitive. As such, businesses that want to get ahead of the competition need to do all they can to scale more efficiently and enable development teams to control crucial parts of their workflows. Implementing an effective PlatformOps strategy is key to achieving this.
What is PlatformOps?
PlatformOps is an approach for managing and providing operational services to development teams. It allows DevOps teams to self-serve while flexibly creating any resource they need. They can do this all from a single platform or frontend.
PlatformOps is also an approach to scaling DevOps practices through a shared self-service platform. By operating and managing this platform, teams can optimise and structure their DevOps practices across an organisation, clearly delineating responsibilities.
The self-service platform encompasses a range of technologies, including infrastructure and development tools, among others. It ensures consistency and integrates best practices, enabling businesses to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud by providing access to the latest technologies. This allows teams to work better and organisations to build, deploy and deliver applications while offering a better developer experience.
Tyk Cloud helps you streamline and facilitate PlatformOps. This article explores how you can use Tyk Cloud to support a robust PlatformOps framework, help your organisation set up quickly and manage your APIs securely and reliably across multiple cloud providers.
How can PlatformOps help?
PlatformOps joins the principles of platform development and operations practices, helping scale DevOps practices by enabling developers to deploy, maintain and self-service their code quickly and reliably.
One key aspect of PlatformOps is that it focuses on providing an automation-backed self-service platform run by a dedicated operations team. It reduces the work of manually maintaining and managing applications by providing a layer of automation. It also minimises the time spent configuring and managing infrastructure. Consequently, PlatformOps allows developers to focus on what they do best: develop.
PlatformOps made easy with Tyk
The shift to cloud-based technologies has significantly impacted how businesses manage their infrastructure. Businesses require a reliable and secure platform to support their digital transformation efforts, making PlatformOps more important than ever. Using it, organisations moving their operations to the cloud can access various solutions, services and resources without relying on physical hardware infrastructure.
However, businesses face new challenges in managing and operating in the cloud. In traditional on-premises infrastructure, operations teams have complete control over the hardware and software stack. Comparatively, cloud-based platforms are more complex, with many interdependent services and configurations that must work together seamlessly.
As organisations must now manage a wide range of services and resources from multiple vendors, PlatformOps has increased in complexity. This means PlatformOps teams need a deep understanding of the different technologies, how they interact, and how to resolve any issues quickly.
PlatformOps and APIs
APIs are vital in PlatformOps – and API management is where Tyk shines. APIs in PlatformOps facilitate automation, integration and communication between platform components. By design, the platform uses APIs for a range of tasks, including:
- Spinning up environments programmatically
- Automating the deployment of apps and services
- Perform numerous manual tasks and actions
Implementing PlatformOps effectively offers infrastructure as code and delivers a suite of automated DevOps processes and self-service resources that development teams can easily access on the frontend.
An API management platform typically serves as a central hub for managing and connecting these APIs. They’re often necessary when implementing PlatformOps to tie everything together. API management platforms include various features like an API gateway, API management tools and a developer portal. They make it easier for organisations to build, manage and scale complex API systems and cloud infrastructure. They can also extend a platform’s functionality by combining other services. API management platforms also provide a centralised and standardised way to manage APIs, monitor usage and enforce security and access policies. The cherry on the top is API management platforms’ ability to enhance visibility into system performance.
By using API platforms, organisations can eliminate the manual effort of integrating different systems and services. Instead of spending their time managing complex integrations, PlatformOps teams can focus on providing value to the business. This leads to increased efficiency, reduced operational costs and improved time to market.
How does Tyk Cloud enable PlatformOps?
Tyk Cloud is an API management service that Tyk manages completely. With Tyk Cloud, we make it easy for organisations to securely create, publish and maintain APIs at any scale, anywhere in the world. All without the hassle of managing the infrastructure yourself. We offer a comprehensive API management solution, providing the tools and features you need to manage and productise APIs for internal and external consumption. With Tyk, you can enjoy a smoothly running, scalable and reliable API management solution without worrying about the infrastructure it runs on.
Tyk Cloud provides various robust solutions to help you manage your APIs and processes. Let’s run through a few of them.
Tyk API Gateway
The Tyk API Gateway is an open-source enterprise API gateway allowing you to control multiple or edge gateways across different cloud providers. It enables you to control who accesses your APIs, when and how, with support for representational state transfer (REST), Graph Query Language (GraphQL), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) protocols. It provides granular access control, API versioning and rate-limiting. Tyk Gateway is designed to be highly performant, with low latency and quotas to protect upstreams from becoming overloaded.
Tyk’s API Gateway is also highly extensible. Its customisable middleware chain supports writing plugins in any language that supports gRPC, from Python to Javascript to Go. Other features include content mediation, Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), webhooks, IP allowlisting, hitless reloads and more.
The Tyk API Gateway is part of our API management platform. Consequently, your teams can use Tyk’s API management capabilities in a completely managed environment without the hassle of managing the underlying infrastructure. This allows your organisation to focus on providing business value.
Tyk Dashboard
We provide an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) dashboard for interacting with most Tyk API management capabilities and features. The web-based interface allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of your APIs and gateways, including initial setup, ongoing configuration, monitoring, and optimisation. You can also create and manage keys, policies, organisations, teams, or tenants through Tyk Dashboard.
Developer Portal
Our Developer Portal facilitates API productisation, enabling you to expose or publish your APIs externally for consumption by third parties or partners. Tyk simplifies API adoption and acquisition by ensuring that the APIs are easy for developers to understand. This means your APIs can be easily discoverable and quickly consumable.
API monitoring and analytics
Tyk Cloud offers monitoring and analytics capabilities by providing raw data on API usage and capturing analytics data based on geography and API popularity. This is powered by Tyk Pump, an observability layer that provides visibility into your APIs by logging essential monitoring and analytics information into Tyk Cloud. You can access this information on your Tyk Cloud Dashboard.
Tyk Multi Data Centre Bridge (MDCB)
Tyk MDCB is an extension of the Tyk control plane. It allows you to easily manage and synchronise clusters of geographically distributed Tyk API Gateways. MDCB supports clusters of Tyk Gateways within and across data centres and the availability of Tyk API Gateways. You can configure and run the API access points, called Worker Gateways, independently, meaning MDCB effectively supports complex architectures.
MDCB serves as a broker between Tyk Gateway instances deployed in different data centres around the globe. It ensures the synchronisation of changes and that deployed API gateways in data centres local to users offer reduced latency, increased availability, and compliance with data residency and sovereignty regulations.
API security governance and policies
Tyk Cloud provides several API management security and governance features, including authentication and authorisation. We include support for various authentication mechanisms, such as OAuth2, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and Basic Authentication. Additionally, you can use custom authorisation policies to control access to APIs, enforce security requirements and for API versioning. That way, you can manage various APIs flexibly, with different security policies.
Tyk Cloud also offers keys to set the context of the token and configure rules, rate limits and other details, and apply policies to individual keys. Furthermore, Tyk Cloud provides granular access control over APIs, allowing you to control which users, organisations or groups can access specific APIs or environments.
Functionality with control
We offer a highly robust self-service cloud solution, allowing your organisation to use your preferred tools and workflows while enjoying the benefits of centralised API management. Tyk Cloud achieves this by offering a flexible and modular integration solution with various tools and control functionalities, including microservices, cloud solutions and native developer tools. Tyk Cloud is also configurable, so you can customise your API management solution to meet your needs and support workflow efficiency.
Additional flexibility with Tyk Cloud
Another key benefit of Tyk Cloud is that it works with your existing APIs. You can import them regardless of the technology or platform they’re built on. This makes Tyk a flexible and versatile API management platform for PlatformOps. You can use it as the main hub for all aspects of your platform solution. Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, Tyk Cloud gives your teams the control and flexibility to choose only the features you need from your API management solution.
Finally, we support most protocols – REST, GraphQL, WebSockets APIs and more – to ensure flexibility in integrating all APIs. We give you a single point of control and visibility for all operations and API solutions. This flexibility allows your teams to easily tailor Tyk Cloud to their specific needs and requirements, making it easy to configure and deploy the services quickly. By providing these features within a simple, intuitive interface, we empower platform teams to improve efficiency while streamlining workflows.
Conclusion
PlatformOps is a framework that streamlines DevOps processes in a scalable way, using a self-service platform to achieve faster, more reliable software releases. By offering a comprehensive suite of self-service cloud services and API management solutions, Tyk Cloud equips you with the necessary tools to implement a robust PlatformOps approach to accomplish your goals.
Get ready to create a reliable and robust platform, deliver high-quality services and ensure customer satisfaction.
Check out Tyk Cloud to learn more about how to set up your PlatformOps team for success.
