VINCI Construction and Tyk
VINCI Construction uses Tyk to centralise the governance of its APIs. The company needed a fully featured API Gateway that was quick to implement and simple to use. Enter Tyk.
Who is VINCI Construction?
VINCI Construction, a global player and leading European building and civil engineering group, employs more than 72,000 people and comprises 800 companies operating on five continents. It designs and builds structures and infrastructure that address the issues facing today’s world – the ecological transition, population growth and demand for housing, mobility, access to healthcare, water and education, and new recreational facilities and work spaces. VINCI Construction marshals its expertise, innovative drive and team engagement to support its customers in a changing world.
Why did VINCI Construction need an API gateway?
VINCI Construction needed Tyk to solve an operational issue. Olivier Vermont, Project Management Deputy Director at VINCI Construction explains:
“We were working on a data exchange strategy to optimise the way applications could talk to each other. We needed to broaden, facilitate and track the IS data consumption. We had several APIs but each had its own governance. We wanted to normalise governance and ease API visibility and security management as well as centralise the operational metrics. The need for an API Gateway was evident.
“We had several APIs in our scope but each of them had its own governance and we were lacking centralised governance. This exposed us to an operational risk considering it was difficult to know who was actually consuming the APIs and what kind of usage was done with them.”
The situation meant that one particular client’s over-consumption could have an impact on all the others, as well as on the service in general. Not only that but uncovering what was happening and who the over-consuming client was had the potential to become a major time-drain.
How is Tyk working with VINCI Construction?
VINCI Construction is using an on-premises, 2-nodes deployment of Tyk, with three environments (dev/test, pre-production and production). Current API traffic is 7.2 million calls per month, with a peak traffic rate of 24,350 calls per hour.
“Tyk enables us to manage governance regarding our APIs,” reports Olivier Vermont. “We manage security and distribute our keys through Tyk. There is now no other way to consume an API in-house.”
The security and authentication and authorisation benefits of Tyk are a key part of the solution, with VINCI Construction essentially using APIs to enable its different applications (internal and external) to exchange data.
Through Tyk, VINCI Construction has achieved better governance, security and traceability of the multiple API consumptions that are made by its different apps.
Why Tyk?
“We were looking for a product with a good value for money aspect concerning its features,” reveals Olivier Vermont, adding that the company also needed “a support plan to be in compliance with our Ops requirements.”
VINCI Construction chose Tyk because it was looking for a fully featured API Gateway at a competitive price. The company needed to start with something simple and efficient. The product was set up by VINCI Construction’s Ops team and the implementation ran smoothly.
Tyk quickly proved its value and, after the solution had been in place for a year, VINCI Construction ramped up to a second environment and silver support. The company’s Olivier Vermont comments:
“One key point was also that the product was quite easy to set up and get running. The Dashboard is very useful to set up our needs around APIs, and we are able to solve certain challenges in a matter of hours with the product out the box.”
How is VINCI Construction benefitting from using Tyk?
VINCI Construction is enjoying a number of benefits as a result of using Tyk. The immediate benefit was that the company was able to trace the activity of its APIs and identify issues that would have been time-consuming to find without Tyk. But that’s not all.
“The fact that Tyk was quickly up and running and its broad features helped us gain maturity on API publication,” comments Olivier Vermont. “We were quickly able to switch our existing APIs on Tyk and it has now become obvious for developers to have their APIs exposed through Tyk.”
What does the future hold for VINCI Construction and Tyk?
The benefits of the Tyk solution are set to continue growing. VINCI Construction is looking forward to using the developer portal and plans to use Tyk Sync to migrate its configurations from one environment to another (dev/test, pre-production and production). The company is also looking at automating the configuration of its APIs for the needs of its CI/CD pipelines.
And finally, the most important questions …
If Tyk were a car, what kind of car would she be? And why?
According to Olivier, if Tyk were a car she would be: “Something like a Seat Ibiza/VW Polo: medium-sized, comfortable, good value for money and quite reliable.”
Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
“Definitely one horse-sized duck”, Vermont responds decisively.
