A cloud platform and digital innovation journey with ZEISS and Tyk

ZEISS has over 38,000 employees across its market segments, including semiconductor manufacturing technology, industrial quality and research, medical technology and consumer markets.

ZEISS is using Tyk API Gateway, Universal Data Graph and the Tyk API management platform to deliver a unified API management solution that enables seamless innovation across business units. With Tyk, the platform team has established a foundation for delivery teams, enabling them to deploy and operate their workloads within a framework for scalability, efficiency and excellence in customer experience. This ultimately links operational success to a richer customer journey and increased revenue.

To support faster development and better customer experiences across its business units, the company is embracing cloud-native tools and architecture. As part of this journey, ZEISS needed an API management platform to help standardize, centralize, and support its move toward a MACH-based approach built on microservices, API-first design, cloud-native infrastructure, and headless systems.

A leader in its industry, ZEISS is navigating the complex world of digital transformation, with its Zeiss Digital Partners department offering digital solutions to ZEISS’ wide range of business units. The organization needed to combine complex cloud-native tools like Kubernetes, Argo and GitHub while streamlining the onboarding of teams into its new environment.

Key to this was a need for REST to GraphQL transformations, as well as a solution that served as an enabler for new aspects and requirements of ZEISS’ MACH architecture. ZEISS’ Alexander Troppmann explains: 

“Our vision was to speed up the development of user journeys while reducing implementation efforts and costs. We wanted to reduce maintenance efforts and increase security. Our focus was fewer applications, less code, fewer bugs and greater productivity. Tyk was the solution.”

“Tyk’s API management solution serves as the central enabler to orchestrate our capabilities and APIs. With Tyk we can create and maintain not only service-specific APIs but also build API aggregations, proxies, mocks or even a mixture of these different kinds of APIs.”

ZEISS is leveraging the power of Tyk’s Universal Data Graph to overcome the challenge of creating seamless customer journeys across Kubernetes clusters. It started with JS Lambdas and Golang native plugins, then migrated to Tyk gRPC plugins, for full control over configuration data and to simplify the upgrade process of its Tyk data-plane.

Tyk is now facilitating the development and deployment of reusable capabilities across ZEISS’ business units. In addition to Universal Data Graph, custom-built gRPC plugins, GitOps and OAS API definitions have all been central to this success. Also important to ZEISS was the level of support its teams received from Tyk. Alexander explains:

“Tyk provides extremely good support. For any question and any problem we always receive a comprehensive answer and solution really fast. We really appreciate the quality of support that Tyk provides to ZEISS. No matter if it’s just a simple configuration question or a request on how to get a bigger scenario implemented in Tyk, the support team is always very responsive and provides comprehensive feedback, examples and ideas. Plus, Tyk provides comprehensive training sessions, meetings and upskill events, and comes up with new ideas and features nearly every quarter.”

By centralizing its APIs, ZEISS is delivering seamless, unified digital journeys for customers across business units. This smoother, more efficient digital experience fosters customer loyalty and opens up opportunities for increased revenue.

Internally, Tyk’s platform enables API standardization and development flows, saving time and resources while ensuring consistency. Tyk is powering ZEISS’ API-first approach, decoupling software development and enabling migration path scenarios for legacy application APIs. It serves REST APIs from existing backend APIs as GraphQL APIs, enabling frontend developers to fetch data easily. 

ZEISS is also using Tyk Operator to enable its teams to use a modern, descriptive way to build and maintain resources on its infrastructure, relying on this for most of its Tyk configurations.

“Tyk orchestrates our microservices and provides a strong framework for implementation of our own custom modules. It establishes seamless user journeys for the scenarios where it’s already in place, while for authorization flows the feature set from Tyk is very helpful. Enabling frontends by providing GraphQL through Universal Data Graph APIs is also speeding up integration efforts – and will continue to do so in the future.”

– Alexander Troppmann, Lead Cloud-native Architect for Platform Integration at ZEISS

Tyk is already enabling ZEISS’ business units to tap into shared capabilities, speeding up innovation and development across the organization. For the future, the organization is looking at the potential of Tyk Streams, with Alex commenting:

“Tyk Streams could be a powerful tool to integrate async and sync APIs. This means developers just need to get onboarded to one API tool to use both worlds – classic REST and GraphQL plus event-driven API approaches. We’re also looking at OAS support as that could be a game changer for API development and API gateway integration from our perspective. With Tyk in place, we’re also well positioned for our MACH architecture to act as an accelerator later on.”

ZEISS is now training up its internal developer communities, with new Tyk engineers to support API development actively within their delivery teams. The business plans to migrate more workloads to Tyk, using it to replace existing custom solutions with Universal Data Graph’s GraphQL/REST integration capabilities. Alexander concludes:

“Tyk is a fast growing and innovative leader in the market of API gateways. Our goal is to provide a consolidated, standardized, secure way to work with APIs, with very few customized modules. We expect that we will see more and more applications that are using Tyk API management.”