Tech at Tyk

The Art of The Solution

API Management can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Is it the consolidation of public APIs under a single umbrella? Is it unifying security and standardizing access to internal APIs? Is it an effort to streamline your developers' efforts and let them build out underlying microservices without worrying about authentication and authorization?



Figure 1: An API Gateway fronting the request(s) from API Consumers before proxying them to Microservices.

As a Solutions Architect/Sales Engineer/SME/INSERT-TITLE-HERE, my goal is to make sure that clients understand the value of API management- and what benefits it might bring to their respective organizations. My audience ranges from engineering wizards who could regurgitate the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm from Quake all the way to C-Level executives who are more interested in outcomes versus outputs. This means that on any given day- I could be deep in the technical weeds or delivering high level presentations.

So, what is the best approach to architecting the solution? Frustratingly enough, the answer is it depends. It doesn't matter how good your product is, if your audience doesn't understand it. This means a lot of reading the room, and tons of Q/A prior to showing the actual solution.

In my experience, I've found that approaching technical demos and discussions from an educational perspective is a great way to relate to your audience. Assume your audience is not familiar with API Management; if they are indeed APIM veterans- they'll inform you and you'll be able to move onto more complicated topics without losing the audience. If they are newcomers, they will appreciate the 101.

Once the clients' problem and pain points are understood- it becomes a matter of relating your software capabilities to their use case.

The customer has no easy way to manage APIs declaratively? Leverage Tyk-Operator and our Custom Resource Definitions!

The customer is wondering how to migrate to Tyk from a previous APIM solution with little/no downtime? Utilize our custom key flexibility to import old tokens with no impact to consumers of your old API!

Throughout the entire proof of concept and evaluation process, my role can be as hands-on or as hands-off as possible. It's an absolute pleasure to work with clients and their use-cases. Solutions architecting to me is about finding a balance between requirements elicitation, solutioning and deriving value from customer insights.

For further reading:

Technical Blogs I've written throughout my Tenure at Tyk.

Technical Videos I've produced illustrating a 101 to API Management with Tyk.

So, what is the best approach? It depends.