July 2020 Summaries

Tyk, a SaaS provider, is committed to transparency regarding its platform's uptime, which achieved a reliability rate of 99.96% from July 1st, 2019, to July 7th, 2020. Despite occasional outages, most incidents were brief, typically lasting around 5 minutes, and affected only the SaaS dashboard while users' APIs remained functional but non-updateable. Tyk's internal team promptly addresses issues, providing full incident reports upon request, and plans to release quarterly updates on uptime performance to reassure users of their proactive approach to managing downtime.

Jennifer Craig's tutorial provides a comprehensive guide to setting up a local Tyk API Gateway using NodeJS and Express. It begins with creating a simple API endpoint that returns a JSON response and progresses to establishing a Tyk Gateway to interface with this endpoint. The tutorial details the necessary software installations, such as Docker and Git, and walks through the process of setting up a NodeJS environment, creating an Express app, and testing it locally. It also covers cloning the tyk-pro-docker-demo repository to run the Tyk stack, including the Gateway, Dashboard, and Portal, on a local machine. Key steps include configuring the tyk_analytics.conf file with a valid license key, launching the Tyk stack using Docker, and navigating the Tyk Dashboard to create an API that proxies requests to the NodeJS app. This setup allows users to explore Tyk's features like rate limiting and security, providing a foundational understanding of API management through Tyk's platform.

In 2020, Tyk awarded a grant from its Side Project Fund to "On The Same Page," a minimal collaborative whiteboard developed by software engineer Sergii Zaitsev. Originating as a solution for remote brainstorming, the project allows users to sketch diagrams online without registration, and it has gained popularity among schools during the COVID-19 pandemic for its simplicity and low-tech compatibility. The grant will aid in scaling the platform from Zaitsev's personal server to dedicated infrastructure and enhance its machine learning capabilities. The platform supports remote collaboration, prioritizes data security, and offers flexibility for both commercial and nonprofit users. Despite challenges in scalability and marketing, Zaitsev is focusing on improving the product's functionality and exploring its potential commercial applications, particularly in educational settings.

In her article, Jennifer Craig explores the multifaceted role of an API architect using the Six Thinking Hats framework developed by Edward de Bono. Each "hat" represents a different aspect of the role: the White Hat focuses on gathering factual information and using analytics to assess API performance; the Red Hat incorporates emotional and subjective assessments during API design reviews; the Black Hat evaluates potential risks and security concerns; the Yellow Hat emphasizes advocacy and value creation for developers and end-users; the Green Hat fosters creativity and innovation in API development; and the Blue Hat involves planning and organizing to streamline API processes and portfolios. Craig highlights how these roles may be distributed across individuals or teams within an organization, and emphasizes the importance of recognizing and balancing these roles to ensure comprehensive API development and management.

Tyk's new GraphQL functionality, introduced in the Tyk 3.0 release, enhances API management by allowing users to secure, manage, and build GraphQL services alongside existing RESTful services. This functionality is particularly beneficial for organizations with existing GraphQL services, as it provides features like security, rate limiting, quotas, field-based permissions, and query depth limiting, which can now be applied to GraphQL endpoints. Moreover, Tyk enables the conversion of existing RESTful services into GraphQL endpoints with ease, facilitating a Backend-for-Frontend approach and the creation of a Universal Data Graph by stitching together multiple data sources. The enhanced GraphQL capabilities, designed to simplify and safeguard the management of GraphQL services, promise further updates and features in the future to improve user experience and functionality.

The tutorial by Jennifer Craig demonstrates how to convert an existing SOAP web service into a RESTful service using Tyk, a tool that facilitates this transformation without coding. By leveraging the Tyk dashboard, users can quickly expose SOAP services as JSON-based RESTful services through body transformations. The process involves importing APIs using a WSDL, adding body transformations, modifying headers to change content types, and testing the new endpoint. This approach allows users to create a RESTful facade over a SOAP service, enabling modern web applications to access legacy systems efficiently. The tutorial highlights the simplicity and speed of this transformation, emphasizing that it can be done within minutes with minimal resources and no need for coding, making it production-ready rapidly.

In the upcoming release of Policy and Key Manager 3.0, significant updates have been made to improve user experience and efficiency, including a redesigned layout that enhances the Policy Management and Key Management tables with additional information such as policy states, access rights, and authentication types. Users can now filter policies more effectively, set rate limits, throttling, and usage quotas more easily, and manage path-based permissions with greater clarity. The updates also include a more intuitive process for setting authentication details and applying policy states, which have been consolidated into a single option called ‘Policy State’. Additionally, the interface now groups actions within each API or policy, enabling users to edit policies and keys with improved visibility and control over settings such as global limits, quotas, and authentication requirements. These changes aim to streamline workflows and offer more detailed oversight, while a new FAQ and video walk-through provide guidance on navigating the updated system.

Tyk, a remote-first company, is renowned for its exceptional customer support, which plays a crucial role in maintaining the mission-critical systems of its diverse client base, including major names like Sephora and Hotelbeds. With a commitment to radical responsibility and a global presence spanning 24 countries, Tyk ensures round-the-clock support and rapid response times, averaging 35 minutes and 18 seconds in 2020. The company prioritizes customer experience by empowering experienced engineers to handle support requests directly, rather than relying on a traditional tiered support model. This approach, combined with a strong customer-focused ethos driven from the top down, has led to outstanding feedback and high customer satisfaction ratings, as evidenced by a 97% CSAT score and a perfect score on recent Gartner reviews. Tyk's support strategy emphasizes quick acknowledgment of issues, personalized assistance, and treating every client as an extended part of the team, ensuring that all customer needs are met efficiently, regardless of their size or financial contribution.