Land Information New Zealand and Tyk
Land Information New Zealand provides expert property and location information on New Zealand’s land, sea and rivers, manages Crown land and regulates overseas investments. It is working with Tyk to achieve greater efficiency in building and managing APIs, enabling the department to get its microservice products to market faster and more cost-effectively.
Who is Land Information New Zealand?
Toitū Te Whenua – Land Information New Zealand – is a government department providing a wide range of services relating to the country’s land, sea and rivers. Its work encompasses everything from Crown property applications and land records to maritime safety, along with maps, charts, geodesy and much more.
Land Information New Zealand carries out this work by providing microservices, which external users such as surveyors, property lawyers and the general public consume through its app. Internal teams build the microservices, using an ecosystem of around 50 APIs to do so.
Why did Land Information New Zealand need an API gateway?
Before using Tyk, Land Information New Zealand’s teams were relying on proxy generators, then manually copying and pasting APIs. Product Owner Ankit Tarway comments:
“Doing everything manually was draining developers’ time. It was very inefficient. We replaced the manual processes with Tyk API Gateway, resulting in significant time and cost savings. With Tyk in place, complexity reduced and efficiency increased. Having everything centralized made our API development and maintenance drastically easier and more cost-effective.”
Implementing Tyk Gateway also served as a secondary use case, as Tarway explains:
“Tyk has made it much easier to review and enhance our API security – that’s been an additional benefit of using the gateway.”
Why Tyk?
Land Information New Zealand was seeking the right balance between features and cost. It undertook a cost benefit analysis, comparing Tyk with other API gateway providers.
“We don’t want to pay for features we’re not going to use,” continues Tarway. “Tyk delivers all the features we need at the best price. Choosing Tyk made sense both operationally and financially.”
What volume of traffic is Land Information New Zealand handling?
API traffic can reach 40,000 requests per minute: 80 developers and 13,000 end users relying on Land Information New Zealand’s APIs.
How is Tyk working with Land Information New Zealand?
Tyk is providing Land Information New Zealand with a simple, efficient solution for developing and maintaining its APIs, resulting in a much faster product release cycle.
Land Information New Zealand has deployed Tyk as a self-managed installation, hosted on AWS in Sydney. It uses Tyk for its production, non-production, pre-production and development environments, making good use of Tyk’s role-based access control user management capabilities.
Using Tyk to modernize its infrastructure has enabled Land Information New Zealand to enhance its operations’ overall efficiency and security and improve scalability and time to market. It has standardized and aligned its API implementation approach while improving monitoring and alerting.
Without Tyk Gateway in place, the future would have looked very different for the department. Its already complex API ecosystem and processes would have continued to become more cumbersome and require more manual intervention and coordination across different teams. Costs would have remained higher, with inefficiencies driving the need for additional resources. Relying on so many manual processes also meant greater scope for security flaws – something no organization can afford to take lightly.
How was the implementation process?
Implementing Tyk was a clear and simple process, with Product Owner Ankit Tarway serving as an internal champion at Land Information New Zealand. The infrastructure team spearheaded the implementation, with developers engaged throughout the process on Tyk’s features and capabilities. Tarway oversaw the implementation, facilitating Tyk’s rollout and adoption for all API-related development.
We have 50 APIs. Tyk has enabled us to save two hours per API by reducing the complexity of our processes and streamlining our maintenance needs. That’s 100 hours saved, which is good for us in dollar terms. And not only are we saving money, but we’re getting products to market faster.
How does Land Information New Zealand benefit from using Tyk?
In addition to reaping the rewards of simplified API development and deployment, Land Information New Zealand is enjoying the security benefits of using Tyk to manage its APIs. The team has also been impressed with the support of Tyk’s account team, provided as part of Tyk’s Gold Service Level Agreement. Land Information New Zealand has made use of Tyk’s community board as well, reaping the reward of extensive open source community expertise.
A further benefit has been the improved developer experience that Tyk API Gateway has enabled. Developers now have the tools and resources they need to easily and efficiently build APIs, saving time and headaches while fostering innovation. The increased agility also puts Land Information New Zealand in a stronger position to quickly respond to market changes and customer needs.
What does the future hold for Land Information New Zealand and Tyk?
For now, Tyk’s functionality is perfectly aligned with Land Information New Zealand’s release timelines and requirements. But that’s not to say there isn’t scope for further developments in future, as Product Owner Ankit Tarway concludes:
“We’re interested in Tyk’s Developer Portal. While we don’t use it currently, if we get to the point of exposing our APIs to our business partners, then it will be very handy. We’ve already talked to our developers about its potential – we’re thinking about the Developer Portal in terms of its long-term value.”
