The impact of Tyk on Coliquio’s API Management?
Using Tyk has helped improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Coliquio’s API Programme. Coliquio loves Tyk’s stability, which has reduced downtime and errors for the internal team, and increased external developer adoption.
Implementing Tyk has also helped Coliquio drive API innovation, and provided a foundation for the future. This isn’t just internal innovation either – Coliquio now offers APIs via Tyk to its partners, customers and users, enabling them to build third party products on top of the Coliquio platform.
Besides migrating newly-developed APIs to Tyk, one of the team’s next ambitions is to publish their API catalogue via the Tyk Dev Portal.
What is Coliquio?
Coliquio is the largest and fastest- growing closed community network for medical physicians in Germany, used by over 180,000 practitioners and clinicians across all specialisations.
The secure platform, accessible exclusively by physicians, offers real time dialogue, knowledge centers, treatment guidelines, certified educational resources and latest medical news.
Coliquio currently has 20 APIs, developed and maintained by two internal teams, and managed by 2 Tyk Pro Gateway nodes.
What challenges did Coliquio face?
APIs play an important part in Coliquio’s business, helping to optimise both their technology and product strategies.
On the technology side, Coliquio is investing in decentralisation of software product development
and REST APIs are the key building block that facilitates the necessary separation.
Coliquio also offers APIs to its partners, customers and users to enable them to build third party products on top of the Coliquio platform. To do this, it’s vital that their public APIs can be exposed in a secure and usable way.
Before using Tyk, the Coliquio team used a simple reverse proxy setup as API Gateway, with open source technologies like haproxy and apache mod-proxy.
As the number of APIs grew, though, this approach lacked the API Management features that would optimise Coliquio’s use of APIs.
Why did Coliquio turn to Tyk?
Though there were a range of API Management features that Coliquio knew they could benefit from, Coliquio were primarily attracted to Tyk because of its plugins.
Tyk’s extensibility was ideal for Coliquio, who were looking to add some custom middleware to decode JWTs and make payload available to different virtual paths.
The API analytics included in the Tyk API Management Platform also stood out to the Coliquio team, who were keen to understand more about how their APIs are consumed.
Finally, Tyk’s commitment to keeping their API Gateway open source appealed to Coliquio, who have
used open source products in the past and would like to vision for their software too.
How do Coliquio use Tyk day to day?
Coliquio run Tyk On Premise (2 node) across 3 environments: Sandbox, Staging and Production, to secure and manage their 20 APIs seamlessly whether in development, testing, or live.
As well as using Tyk to keep their API operations running smoothly, the team also took full advantage of Tyk’s extensibility to build their own custom Tyk CI/CD environment. They use this environment to compile, test and deploy Tyk API definitions against the Tyk Dashboard and Admin API.
Their most popular Coliquio API running on Tyk is their “editorial content“ API, where users and customers can consume and review professional content written by experts. In the coming months Coliquio plan to publish a catalogue of APIs via the Tyk Dev Portal.
Within the engineering team, Tyk’s most valuable assets are features like API request logging and easy integration of OpenID Connect.
