The impact for Scout24, of implementing Tyk
Scout24 noticed an immediate benefit resulting from implementing Tyk. Backend developers were suddenly able to delegate the job of exposing, securing and documenting APIs to non-developers. Developer time has reduced and Scout24 can now serve its customers better, as well as providing paid APIs.
In addition, the business can now leverage the fact that Tyk can be updated and configured via REST. As a result, it is looking at the process of exposing new APIs or versions in that way, with Tyk acting as the catalyst for further innovation.
Who is Scout24?
Scout24 Schweiz is a 700-employee strong business based in Switzerland. Through AutoScout24.ch, ImmoScout24.ch and Anibis.ch, the Scout24 group delivers Switzerland’s leading online marketplace for vehicles, its most visited online marketplace for real estate and one of the country’s leading online marketplaces for classifieds.
In need of support for API versioning, developer onboarding (documentation) and better security for its APIs, Scout24 scoured the internet for the ideal solution. There, they found Tyk.
What API challenges did Scout24 face?
Working with both public and internal APIs, Scout24 needed to make APIs a priority within its verticals, creating new business opportunities by selling API products. The business also needed support for API versioning, along with enhanced security.
Scout24 has around 10 APIs (and counting), with around 1,000,000,000 requests per month and a peak API traffic rate of roughly 1,000 per second. The business has around 100 developers, with 10 of them working fulltime on its APIs. End-users number from 10 to 8,000 depending on the product. This will increase once its beta products go mainstream.
Why did Scout24 turn to Tyk?
How has Scout24 used Tyk day-to-day?
Scout24 “googled the hell out of the internet” in their search for a usable, affordable API gateway that met its needs. The business needed to integrate existing APIs and protect them, selectively expose endpoints, provide a developer portal for onboarding and use API key management. Enter Tyk!
After licensing another vendor, but not getting it working as expected, the Scout24 team was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up a Tyk test environment with docker and test it on its existing APIs.
The initial localhost docker test-setup took just a couple of hours, while the dockerised test-environment took a couple of days, end to end (having an existing API exposed, with security, access keys and swagger docs).
Tyk provided all of the features that Scout24 required without being bloated with thousands of other pointless features. It included a working web user interface (dashboard) for API management and a setup that was both simple and rapid. Scout24 was also impressed by Tyk’s fair pricing.
Scout 24 has found Tyk to be intuitive and easy to use. It has provided a clear solution for onboarding product teams and exposing their existing APIs. Tyk has enabled the API-first approach that Scout24 was seeking, making APIs first citizens.
AutoScout24 adopted Tyk initially, and soon after, ImmoScout24 and Anibis followed suit. Deployment is via the business’ data centre in Switzerland.
Scout 24 is using Tyk’s gateway, dashboard and portal, with the gateway being the service it relies on most heavily, thanks to it securing Scout24’s API servers from direct access. The business has praised both Tyk’s superfast support and the usefulness of the Tyk community board.
Typical workflow when using Tyk includes integrating an existing API by importing its swagger API, configuring security and CORS, creating a policy, creating the API in the portal, copying the swagger from earlier offline, changing URLs to point to Tyk and adding this new swagger for the portal docs.
