AMAAN Indonesia and Tyk
Dynamic start-up AMAAN Indonesia needed an API gateway as part of its microservices architecture. The company now benefits from Tyk’s performance and stability to serve its 4,000 field agents and more than one million end users.
What is AMAAN Indonesia?
AMAAN Indonesia provides a sharia digital platform that empowers female micro-entrepreneurs and their families in six provinces of Indonesia.
The company’s core products went live in March 2021, and the business has grown rapidly. It now employs 200 staff, including a 90-strong technical team encompassing 50 developers. The Tyk API Gateway has been at the front and centre of that growth.
Why did AMAAN Indonesia need an API gateway and management solution?
The need for an API gateway was driven by AMAAN Indonesia’s microservices architecture. AMAAN Indonesia’s Cloud Architect, Hannoto Yang, explains how critical an API gateway is to operations:
Tyk is front and centre of everything we do. Quite simply, the company would not be able to operate, and the product would not exist, without Tyk.
AMAAN Indonesia’s platform is available in the Play Store. From there, some 4,000 field agents distribute it across six Indonesian provinces.
The company has three sorts of clients, all of whom consume its APIs:
- The web back office, which deals with client-side programming.
- 4,000 field agents who have installed the AMAAN Indonesia app from the Play Store
- The company has 1.08 million end users – and counting!
How is Tyk working with AMAAN Indonesia?
AMAAN Indonesia uses Tyk for central API management for its internal and external APIs.
With 950 APIs, the company needed a reliable authentication and authorisation solution to underpin its digital transformation. AMAAN Indonesia is also taking advantage of the analytics capabilities that Tyk provides, examining everything from response times to the number of API calls to gain a deeper understanding of its operations.
To facilitate this, AMAAN Indonesia uses an on-premise installation of Tyk with one Tyk API Gateway, two nodes in production (high availability, active-active), and one gateway with two nodes in development. Tyk is deployed on Alibaba Cloud’s Jakarta sites. Currently, API traffic stands at around 230 million calls per month, with a peak API traffic rate of 330 per second.
Examples of Tyk in action at AMAAN Indonesia
AMAAN Indonesia has used the Tyk API Gateway since the first day it went into production, using the gateway to both manage its microservices and publish its external APIs.
The team was impressed with how easy it was to implement Tyk. They used Terraform code with Docker to set everything up, then connected to Redis and MongoDB. Hannoto Yang recalls:
We built the code and the installation processes fairly fast. It took less than a week because we used the Terraform code. Then the setup for the API definition took around one or two months because we wanted to find our pattern.
One of the most complex elements of AMAAN Indonesia’s operations that Tyk is underpinning in its daily sync process. Hannoto explains:
The sync process requires complicated elements both from the client and server sides. More than 4,000 field agents sync their tablet data through our mobile device management tools every morning. There’s nobody to support them out there in the field, as AMAAN Indonesia is purely digital. Everything is inside the tablet, so it has to be very reliable. With Tyk, we never have an issue with the APIs or the gateway management, and the performance is very stable.
When it comes to using Tyk, AMAAN Indonesia’s Hannoto comments:
It’s easy to manage, from defining an API to publishing, we can manage everything through the dashboard. And because of Tyk’s thorough documentation, we can read the documentation and then explore what else is there. Tyk is a stable product with very good performance.
How is AMAAN Indonesia benefitting from using Tyk?
Development speed has been the most notable benefit that AMAAN Indonesia has experienced. Using Tyk, the company has increased the team’s productivity by enabling developers to define and create APIs easily. And for a start-up, speed to market is always critical. Cloud Architect Hannoto observes:
Speed to market has a major impact from a business point of view. Tyk provides the bridge that connects everything together between the back end and the client side, enabling us to develop and deliver as fast as possible. It’s an excellent product, very stable, and so reliable because it’s really fast.
Tyk’s extensive documentation supports the company experiment and explores additional functionality as it scales. Tyk’s support team has also been available to work with AMAAN Indonesia while implementing its API management solution and beyond.
What’s next for AMAAN Indonesia and Tyk?
AMAAN Indonesia’s rapid growth has seen the company scale to over one million users during its first 18 months of operations, running in six of Indonesia’s provinces. Over the next three years, the company plans to roll out its services to more provinces (Indonesia is home to 37 in total), building up to 10 million end users. Tyk will be there every step of the way to support the business as it scales.
