As developers and technical people we can be extremely opinionated when it comes to using languages, frameworks, infrastructure, and anything else that can make our job easier (or harder!). Convincing others on our team and within our organisation to use our tool of choice can be difficult! This is why we’ve put together a list of five things we think you and your team will love about Tyk’s API gateway and API management platform. We will look at a few factors that show the value of Tyk to developers, the business, and other stakeholders associated with a decision like bringing in a new API management tool!
#1 – Tyk is extremely flexible and customisable
Tyk is flexible and customisable in many different ways. It’s important to remember that having an API Management platform that is flexible and customisable is crucial to putting a long-term solution in place. Implementing new solutions in place of old ones can be extremely expensive and time consuming for organisations. Ensuring that the implemented solution can grow and change with the needs of business and technology is important.
Here are a few examples of the flexibility of Tyk:
Ability to create custom plugins
Unfortunately, when it comes to APIM, it’s sometimes impossible for a platform to cover every single need of an organisation (even if we get darn close!). As part of knowing this hurdle we decided to make our platform extremely easy to build custom plugins for. This means that developers can create plugins to integrate with Tyk and cover all their possible use-cases. Our customisable plugin approach allows Tyk to fit the needs of your business now and in the future.
Multiple deployment types
Not all organisations can abide by a single type of deployment. We understand that some companies may be very excited about a cloud-based, SaaS APIM solution while others may need the flexibility of an on-premise, self-managed solution. At Tyk, we support both and then some! We’ve worked hard to create one of the most robust APIM solution in the cloud with our Tyk Cloud platform and have also worked hard to push our self-managed offering to be easily supported the native Linux installs, Docker-based installs, and most recently allowed for native Kubernetes support with our Tyk Operator. Whatever your deployment needs are, Tyk is able to meet the challenge.
Scaling globally with Multi Data Centre Bridge
A focus for many businesses is the ability to scale to a truly global level while still maintaining amazing performance across your systems. In terms of API management, this is where Tyk’s Multi Data Centre Bridge, or MDCB, plays a key role. By using MDCB you can have a master control plane where you configure all of your gateways through a single source of truth, while allowing you to deploy your gateway on infrastructure around the globe, closest to your customers that will be using it. This allows for easy scaling across the globe while keeping all the admin and configuration under a single pane of glass.
Multiple options for configuring your APIs and other management components
The need to accommodate multiple ways of configuring your API management platform is extremely important here at Tyk. This is why we offer multiple ways to configure the platform to suit your organisation’s needs. For those who are running the community edition of Tyk, you can easily interact with the gateway APIs to easily configure your Tyk instance and manage all of your API resources. Those running our enterprise options will have even further options including configuring your Tyk instance through the Tyk dashboard for a more UI-based approach or through the gateway and dashboard APIs. As mentioned earlier, we also support a declarative approach to APIM configuration as well with the introduction of the Tyk Operator which allows you to use declarative syntax to easily create, update, and scale Tyk within Kubernetes.
#2 – Tyk is open-source and proud of it!
With the shift to many large organisations utilising open-source technologies, Tyk fits nicely into such an objective. All of our major components, including our gateway, are open-source and backed by a thriving community of users and contributors.
The first iteration of Tyk’s gateway was built upon the fundamentals of leveraging the open-source community and mindset to build one of the most performant and lightweight API gateway available. Since then, we have worked hard to continue to build our product with open-source at its heart. Our community forum has also grown to be a great resource for product direction and to assist fellow users with some of their most pressing issues they are looking to solve with Tyk.
Our open-source, community edition gateway still continues to be a very popular option for many organisations, big and small, and is also the main component in our enterprise platform. We have also made some of our most recent advancements, like the newly released Tyk Operator, fully open-source as well to expedite the development and generate more value to potential users.
In general, the benefits of leveraging a product with open-source at its core include: transparency, reliability, better security, a more cost-effective solution, and many other perceived benefits. Tyk brings all of these benefits to the table packaged as one of the leading API Management solutions in the industry.
#3 – Tyk has an amazing support team behind it
Our support capabilities are amongst the best in the industry. At Tyk we pride ourselves in being able to solve issues efficiently and effectively with a very quick turnaround time. Our team of skilled support and consulting engineers are at the ready to help you from developing your first proof-of-concept with Tyk all the way through to troubleshooting issues within your production environment. With a wide array of support plans, you can very easily choose the support that best fits the needs of your business while balancing your budget.
At Tyk we also pride ourselves in being a global company with team members in every corner of the planet. This means that there is always someone online to help and assist, regardless of what timezone you are in!
Lastly, with open-source being in our veins we heavily monitor and utilise our global community of users and team members to moderate and answer questions on our community forum. Many of our toughest problems and best features originate from discussion within our community forum. A vibrant community of contributors leads to quick answers and helpful solutions to some of the most complex and urgent problems faced by Tyk users.
#4 – Save money with “Batteries-included” API Management
It’s not often you come across a technology product that includes everything needed to run it optimally without added costs. Tyk has aimed to change that with our approach that we like to call “batteries-included”. We believe that we have built an amazing product that everyone needs, so why charge extra? All of the features of our gateway are included out of the box whether you are using our enterprise offering or our community edition, no upgrade needed!
As part of this goal to make the best available gateway and API management platform available to the masses without added cost of upgrades, we also include a huge array of authorisation modes. One of the most important (and often included as an upgrade by other platforms and gateways) is our out-of-the-box support for OAuth 2.0. As one of the most popular authorisation frameworks out there it only made sense for us to include this support by default in all versions of our product, including our free community edition.
We also have a deep understanding that not all companies require the same features and some may even require deeply customised implementations. Tyk was built to do exactly this with its ability to be customise security implementations through custom authorisation modes.
Tyk is also built to scale with your company and with technology as it progresses. Our platform’s ability to use customisable and easy-to-build plugins means that you’ll never have to worry about replacing Tyk due to capability limitations and instead can easily build a solution to accommodate any needs you may have that the platform doesn’t natively support.
We believe that the best policy is to include our gateways best and most popular features, by default. Tyk is one of the most cost effective solutions out there thanks to including the features you need at no extra cost and allowing the platform to fit your needs, present and future, via plugin capabilities. “Batteries included” API Management, for the win.
#5 – Tyk is light-weight and fast!
We’ve really put Tyk through its paces over the last while and have come up with some astonishing numbers. Our gateway, even on a minimal amount of infrastructure, can support some of the most API-intensive businesses on the planet with minimal latency. Written in Go, the entire Tyk platform has been engineered with speed and efficiency in mind.
Latency can be a real crux when it comes to responsiveness and customer satisfaction. By adding in an API management solution, there can be concern with the latency added by proxying requests through an API gateway. With Tyk, we strive to include the maximum amount of useful and secure features while minimising the amount of overhead incurred by the gateway. The result: minimal latency without sacrificing the functionality that developers and organisations need most.
Our benchmarks allow you to easily see how we were able to achieve throughput of over 69,000 requests per second for minimal cost, with a single gateway. This should help reassure your team that Tyk can easily support the needs of your business. Matter of fact, many of the globe’s largest companies on earth choose Tyk as their API Management platform of choice to handle extremely large throughput to their most critical APIs.
Get your team on board today!
If the above benefits are enticing to you and your team, why not get started today with a free trial! Browse our documentation and blog to find out more about our latest features and share the benefits of Tyk with your team. We are always excited to see what value Tyk’s API management solution can bring to an organisation and look forward to seeing how API Management can help!
