Do you need to replace Mashery? Are you looking for a cost-effective, highly performant alternative that comes with outstanding support? If so, you’re in the right place.
Replacing a legacy platform like Mashery (formally known as TIBCO) with Tyk can deliver a wide range of business benefits when you do it right. We’ll take a look at these below. We’ll also explore how you can painlessly replace Mashery with Tyk, but before we dive into the tech, let’s look first at why you might want to make the move.
Is it time to upgrade TIBCO Mashery?
If you’re thinking of upgrading Mashery to an alternative solution, you’re probably aware that it’s possible to get more for less elsewhere. Much more.
Mashery has been around for quite some time. Since it launched, we’ve moved to a fast-paced, microservice-powered, Kubernetes-enabled, service-mesh-linked world of modern APIs. It’s a world that demands superb scalability, customisability and flexibility. Tyk delivers all of this and more. Legacy platforms? Not so much…
If you are using a ‘private cloud’, like the one Mashery offers, you find that you lack control and flexibility over your infrastructure. The high degree of contractual and vendor lock-in can restrict choice and innovation in terms of your architecture, compared to something deployed across the public cloud.
Quite simply, next-gen API platforms are easier to manage, faster and more responsive to your needs. They can scale to large traffic volumes more easily than legacy providers like Mashery and provide outstanding support at the same time.
Price is often, understandably, a major consideration too. With many legacy providers, the price goes up as your traffic increases. This effectively penalises you for growing your business, which hardly seems sustainable. A modern, next-gen platform, designed for scalability should have a much more equitable pricing model.
Why replace Mashery with Tyk?
The decision to upgrade Mashery to Tyk is a big one. Mashery is an API platform that tends to bind clients quite tightly to its products, so a strategic, holistic approach is required when it comes to migrating to Tyk. But that doesn’t mean it can’t reduce your costs and be migrated quickly.
It’s a process that is well worth investing time in. Why? Because bringing in Tyk to replace Mashery can deliver:
- Substantial cost savings
- A better developer experience
- Optimised performance
- Enhanced capabilities
- A move to public cloud
- GraphQL capability
- Industry-leading customer service
- A continuous product improvement cycle, based on user feedback
And that’s just for starters. There’s also the fact that Tyk is open source. As Carlos Bautista San Miguel, head of product management at Hotelbeds, explains (after Hotelbeds moved from Mashery to Tyk):
“The fact that Tyk was open source meant that even if something happened to Tyk, the code and the community would still be accessible to the Hotelbeds team. This created both stability and a perennial approach.”
Bautista also highlighted the breadth of the benefits that moving to Tyk delivered for Hotelbeds:
“In total, the Tyk solution provided significant cost savings for Hotelbeds for the first year into production, while delivering a superior service, with quicker time to go live for new APIs and the ability to migrate any kind of traffic.”
Tyk’s pricing model is per environment, with no limitations in respect of traffic volumes. It has been designed to be deployed on the public cloud, use AWS, GCP, Azure or a combination of these and any other hosting platform. This is one of the ways in which Tyk can deliver such a substantial saving when compared to Mashery.
Tyk also delivers ultimate control straight into your hands. Mashery’s heavily cloud-focussed solutions mean that you don’t have full control. This can be particularly problematic in the banking industry and other sectors where compliance and trust are so important. With Tyk you can choose precisely how much control you have, opting for an on-premise solution if that suits you best.
For companies with an international footprint, Tyk also makes it easy for you to isolate data flows and have gateways near your customers. Our Multi Data Centre Bridge (MDCB) delivers everything you need in this respect, enabling you to ensure data remains located in the region or regions you specify, whilst deploying gateways in as many global locations as you like.
Primarily, it is future-proofing that Tyk can deliver. This is why so many users opt to replace Mashery with Tyk. We provide a more flexible view towards architecture and capability, along with greater flexibility and customisability in the way that you can process traffic. You can use our custom middleware to tailor the product and can introduce specific logic with different languages. That’s not an option with many legacy platforms.
How to replace Mashery with Tyk
Does the thought of all your legacy spaghetti fill you with dread? Fret not – Tyk is here to help you unravel it all, so that your migration can flow smoothly and efficiently. We’re well practiced in the process and have even built open source Tyk plugins, to simplify the process for you!
We’ll work in partnership with you throughout. Before you move from Mashery to Tyk, we’ll work with you to conduct some detailed self-study. We’ll need to identify the dependencies of each API and product, looking at where your traffic is coming from and why.
This usually involves working across multiple teams, so you’ll need to assign a product leader to get everyone on board. After all, a migration of this nature isn’t just a technical process or a cost-saving measure – it’s as much about preparing your people as your systems.
We’ll work with you to identify objectives, including why those particular objectives are key, then focus on obtaining buy-in from all those with a stake in the outcome. Then it’s time to analyse all of your B2B and/or B2C traffic and think about where you’re going to manage your APIs from in regional terms.
We can also help you consider issues such as PCI compliance (for financial institutions). Migrating from Mashery to Tyk is a chance to refresh your approach across the board. Operational decisions made years ago when you first implemented Mashery may not make the same sense now; the world has moved on. What can or should you externalise? Should you be moving from monolith to microservices? With Tyk you can tackle these changes as part of the migration, or place them on a backlog and make the changes over time, as they become relevant. It’s all about working in the way that suits you best.
When you replace Mashery with Tyk, we’ll be with you every step of the way. Migration is an intricate process with plenty of prep to do, but we make it as simple and speedy as possible. We’ll deliver the proof of concept for free, using our trial and open source software components.
We can create custom software to help with the move. We’ll help you with every part of the process, merging traffic, merging APIs and incorporating your legacy authentication mechanism in a way that doesn’t disrupt the end user experience. All of this will be delivered alongside a cost-saving.
Tyk’s immense flexibility and fully featured, ‘batteries included’ approach is helpful here. You have to put specific logic in place in your new API manager to extract the traffic, open the payloads, transform the traffic and so forth. This is all about reverse engineering before hitting the new platform, then setting up duplicate building blocks to migrate and transform your traffic. You may need to adapt your dashboard and tools as well. Again, it comes back to having that holistic approach – and having Tyk beside you throughout.
How long will all of this take? Of course, it depends on the complexity of your current deployment. Getting started with Tyk takes just hours; migrating your first few APIs could be a matter of weeks or months. If you are migrating an entire enterprise, with hundreds of APIs and multiple teams of stakeholders, six months is probably a fair timescale to cover everything from your initial internal analysis through to completion of the migration. It all depends on your individual needs. Our flexible licensing model means you don’t need to pay for two platforms during the migration – we can ensure that at every stage your costs are reduced.
The impact of replacing Mashery with Tyk
Hotelbeds’ decision to upgrade Mashery to Tyk delivered plenty of positive results. The company went from 40,000 requests per second with Mashery, to 60,000+ with Tyk hosted on the public cloud, delivering much improved performance, while reducing costs in both the short- and long-term. Tyk’s lower latency meant faster request processing, while identifiers to trust the traffic were easily handled through a plugin straight out of the box.
Carlos Bautista San Miguel, head of product management at Hotelbeds, comments:
“All of the APIs published were completely covered, along with the authentication mechanisms. As the Tyk solution is fully integrated into our systems, we now have absolute stability and no more management headaches. It is also easy for us to introduce features within the traffic, meaning the system is scalable and capable of working across the multiple different regions we operate in.”
Lower costs, happier developers, outstanding customer support, the easy introduction of new features to your API traffic… all of this is part of the impact that switching from Mashery to Tyk delivers.
