Human Managed and Tyk
Human Managed platform had loosely coupled microservices that it needed to tie together with a hugely customisable API management platform, allowing event-driven services. Enter Tyk.
What does Human Managed do?
Human Managed is an intelligence on-demand platform for digital, cyber and risk decisions.
Their platform interprets data from any source, analyses data with context and enrichment, and orchestrates processes to deliver the intelligence that matters, when it matters. Customers of any size in any sector apply the intelligence to improve their digital services, respond to cyber incidents, and manage risks.
The Human Managed platform is an ecosystem for any participant interested in innovation to exchange and co-create. Individual users, partners and suppliers innovate together on services, or improve their own solutions on the platform.
Why did Human Managed need an API gateway and management solution?
Human Managed was looking for a cloud native API gateway that would deliver two solutions – a way to protect its API platform and the ability to commercialise it.
Why Tyk?
The Human Managed team assessed three potential API solutions: Apigee, Kong and Tyk. Tyk’s flexibility, extensibility and strong performance instantly appealed.
Tyk’s JSON Web Token API authentication capabilities helped with Human Managed’s first requirement – to secure its API platform. The authorisation and authentication protocol, which is standardised around OAuth 2.0, was easy to implement.
Tyk also delivered when it came to supporting Human Managed to commercialise its APIs.
“Tyk’s ability to specify both coarse (e.g. global) and fine-grained rate limits (e.g. per-API) gave us a lot of flexibility in coming up with commercial models for monetising our APIs,” recalls Human Managed Microbuilder Yip Je Sum.
The inclusion of support for GraphQL was another big plus when it came to the decision to choose Tyk, as graphs are likely to feature strongly in the future of the Human Managed platform.
Also important was the fact that Tyk could be deployed 100% in the cloud. The Human Managed team also liked that the gateway was open source, as they enjoyed the transparency of being able to look at the code and identify changes.
How is Tyk working with Human Managed?
It took around two months for Human Managed to install Tyk, as the team was learning about components such as service mesh and installation on Google Cloud Platform as part of the process.
“In retrospect,” comments Je Sum, “minus the learning curve for the other technologies, building a new Tyk installation from scratch would probably take under two hours.”
Human Managed is now using Tyk to support its collection of data points from customers and its generation of subscription customers’ business analytics and intelligence reports. It is monetising API calls by volume on a monthly basis.
The company has six gateways and two environments – production and development – with Tyk deployed via a Google Cloud datacenter in Singapore.
Examples of Tyk in action at Human Managed
Human Managed has a web portal that has several components, such as strategic reporting, time-sensitive analysis and critical asset monitoring. Tyk is an integral part of this portal, which allows Human Managed to provide business insights to its customers.
The Tyk API Gateway is also in place, with everything external going through it to gain access to Human Managed’s data. The company is working with databases – Amazon S3 bucket and Snowflake – with an architecture made up of Tyk, Kubernetes in the cloud, service mesh (Istio), identity platform (AuthO), web frontend rendering Vercel and serverless function (Google App Engine).
How is Human Managed benefitting from using Tyk?
The moment API management was in place with Tyk, Human Managed was able to start monetising its APIs. The company is now building a super-customised plan tailored to its customers’ needs. Tyk’s flexibility has been key to enabling this. It allows Human Managed to slice and dice the different methods to control API access and impose rate limiting.
The team has also been able to map out its future plans as a result of using Tyk. Both GraphQL databases and the automated publishing of APIs are now part of the company’s roadmap.
And all of this has been achieved with minimal hassle. As Microbuilder Yip Je Sum summarises, Tyk have proven:
“Easy to deploy, easy to use, lightweight and really fast. The performance of Tyk is really impressive.”
The team has also benefited from Tyk’s commitment to delivering first-rate support, reporting positive experiences of both the support provided through its SLA and of the Tyk community site. Perhaps most telling is Je Sum’s long-term commitment to the benefits that Tyk delivers:
“Even if I was in a new organisation, I would choose Tyk again.”
What’s next for Human Managed and Tyk?
For Human Managed, part of the joy of using Tyk has been the impact it has had on the company’s future ambitions. A GraphQL database that will sit behind the company’s REST APIs, with Tyk calling the REST APIs and the graph data, which will pass through it before being generated on the Human Managed web portal, is now a firm part of the future.
Using Tyk means that the Human Managed platform will ultimately deploy in any cloud within minutes automatically. Right now, the process is done manually and takes hours. Tyk Operator will be key to this, greatly speeding up time to market and facilitating the easy deployment of new APIs.
Tyk’s extensibility – through its virtual endpoints and custom plugins – is also likely to be incorporated into Human Managed’s future plans. The company is ambitious in its goals and Tyk will be there every step of the way to support the achievement of those goals.
