How Tyk impacted QUT API Management
Tyk was up-and-running managing QUT’s APIs after only a few days, so the QUT team began to see the benefits almost immediately.
Managing the traffic and associated analytics for each API, on a case-by-case basis, would have been untenable for QUT’s team. Tyk has allowed QUT greater centralised control over management of their 32 APIs whilst simultaneously freeing up their time for bigger problems.
In particular, authentication being easier, and having the ability to offload authentication for choice applications, means greater simplicity and efficiency in the QUT API environment.
Crucially, implementing Tyk has allowed QUT to continue to develop APIs that solve and simplify complex internal tech challenges, without increasing their maintenance overhead and associated costs to a prohibitive level.
Who is QUT?
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a leading public research university in Brisbane, Australia. The institution provides quality undergraduate and postgraduate courses to over 48,000 students, from 100 different countries,
with a focus on research that’s relevant to both local industry and community.
QUT focuses on collaboration and innovation in their educational programmes, and they take a similar approach to addressing internal technology requirements. As part of their internal innovation programmes, QUT works with a range of public and internal APIs in order to integrate various applications to one another, and to develop APIs for specific consumer types – such as those on mobile devices.
What API challenges did QUT face?
QUT was faced with managing multiple products, from different vendors, many of which lacked the ability to integrate with other applications, easily or at all. To solve this problem, they developed their own applications to expose APIs that enable communication with the third party products.
With more and more APIs being developed (32 at the last count), QUT needed a way to easily manage and monitor the traffic moving to and from their APIs. The more APIs that were created to solve the application challenges, the more time and effort the solution was taking, primarily on monitoring traffic, analytics and solving authentication.
QUT required a way to simplify their API management, and free up time for their team to work on more innovative and beneficial technology solutions.
Why did QUT turn to Tyk?
The QUT team were keen to focus on an Open Source platform, so Tyk quickly became an API Management solution to consider. Ultimately, QUT opted for the Tyk Pro On Premises version, so that they could benefit from a multitude of cost-effective features on top of the Open Source Gateway, all at a reasonable cost.
Features such as access policies on APIs, rate limiting & quotas, analytics, load balancing, and an out-of-the-box API developer portal, made Tyk particularly suitable for QUT’s API Management needs.
In addition, Tyk’s simple and user-friendly dashboard, in-depth support for transformations, and multiple authentication mechanisms (such as OpenID Connect), immediately streamlined the API Management process for QUT, making it simpler
for QUT’s APIs to deliver more value.
