Workers spread all around the globe? No problem! Distributed teams don’t have to equal inefficiencies. In fact, using Tyk’s platform gives API owners everything they need to collaborate effectively and mature their API operations, no matter how widely dispersed individual developers may be.
Read on to discover how easy it can be to onboard distributed development teams and grow your API ecosystem using the Tyk API platform.
The need for efficiency in distributed teams
Read ten different studies, and you’ll find ten different findings on how productive and efficient distributed teams can be. Future Forum reports that workers with full schedule flexibility deliver 29% higher productivity and 53% greater focusing ability than their inflexibly scheduled colleagues. Atlassian finds that 56% of workers with no mandated in-office time spend more time with friends and family, while 49% devote more time to physical and mental fitness. Meanwhile, Microsoft reports that 85% of leaders believe that hybrid work makes it more challenging to feel confident that employees are productive.
In reality, there are pros and cons to working in distributed development teams. The lack of in-person interaction and time zone mismatches can lead to productivity issues, but they don’t have to. Platform engineering can play a crucial role in countering these challenges effectively, particularly when it comes to platform engineering in the API world.
We can see this in action when you look at how easy it is to onboard distributed development teams onto the Tyk API platform.
Adding new API owners onto Tyk
The Tyk Dashboard is where the magic happens when it comes to providing an easy-to-use management interface for managing a Tyk installation and achieving everything you need to with your APIs. It’s an intuitive GUI and analytics platform that puts you in full control, including when it comes to adding new API owners.
You can add a new dashboard user from within Tyk Dashboard (select system management, users, then add user) and set their permissions after adding some basic info (name, email address and password). You can be very specific regarding what each API owner can and can’t do, meaning that you can tailor access to suit each user. This enables you to give particular access to dashboard pages and the underlying APIs. You can also use role-based access control (RBAC) to give permissions to multiple users based on their roles.
You can use the Tyk Dashboard API to add new users instead, using a simple cURL command. For ultimate control, you can apply read/write permissions on a per-endpoint basis.
Accessing the Tyk Dashboard
Once you’ve added new API owners onto Tyk, they can access the dashboard according to your permissions, no matter where they’re based. Developers can use the dashboard to create and manage API products with impressive efficiency.
You can stand up APIs and configure them based on various settings (protocols, ports, domain-based routing, authentication, categorisation and more). You can create and manage API keys, bundling them into API security policies for ease of use and setting global rate limiting and quotas. You can manage API security policies, create certificates, set up Tyk alerting webhooks and set up single sign-on using a range of provider types. You can also use Open Policy Agent (OPA) rules to write business logic in OPA language to define global rules across all of your APIs – for example, to enforce a specific type of authentication or a particular policy.
This information and extensive functionality can be available to all distributed team members based on the granular permissions you set when adding users.
How to develop APIs using Tyk and mature your API operations
Accessing the Tyk Dashboard also provides distributed teams with detailed usage data, error management functionality and the ability to browse logs. You can set up alerts and monitoring on end services, meaning you can monitor the health of your upstream services and any uptime targets you’ve set.
Being able to do so is essential to continually developing your API products. The greater your understanding of how your products are being consumed, the better positioned you are to tweak those products to meet your consumers’ needs better. This is why drilling down into performance is so essential when it comes to optimising and versioning APIs.
By using the Tyk Dashboard, all members of your distributed development teams can share the same understanding and insights, supporting them to make data-driven decisions when it comes to developing API products and maturing API operations.
Manage APIs into development swiftly and painlessly
The other key element to onboarding distributed development teams with Tyk is the platform’s API Developer Portal. This is an ultra-customisable developer portal for all your API documentation, developer auto-enrolment and usage tracking. It is exposed as a separate component of the application, so you can deploy it internally or externally, depending on your needs.
Between the dashboard and the developer portal, Tyk enables you to manage APIs into development, from planning, design and security through implementation, testing, documentation, versioning and deployment to ongoing monitoring and maintenance. All with team members in a strong position to collaborate and contribute to the success of your API products, no matter where in the world they happen to be.
Ready to find out more? You can chat with the Tyk team or explore our documentation to learn more about how the Tyk Dashboard and Tyk Developer Portal support efficient, productive, distributed development teams.
