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🔗The Client

Our client is a logistics service provider offering line haul transportation using third party contractors, managed distribution centers, direct-to-store fulfillment, and port-to-port supply chain logistics.

Location: Humble, Texas Industry: Logistics Timeline: April 2020 to November 2022

🔗The Challenge

The client’s ERP and line of business systems are heavily integrated with customer and partner systems to automate supply chain management, business intelligence and analytics, product management, HR, finance, risk management, and compliance. The client is an SME with limited IT resources, and recognized that their existing staff were overextended in trying to provide support for API integrations to their customers and partners.

🔗Requirements

The client wanted to provide a central access point for external users to explore and keep track of the client’s software offerings, provide streamline access to credentials, get notifications on changes, and visualize related information.

The core capabilities of the client’s freight management platform were exposed as SOAP web services. Some customers and partners had challenges talking to legacy API endpoints using WSDL. Workflows to onboard new users and manage existing clients required extensive manual effort.

The client wanted to expose their capabilities as modern REST APIs which their customers and partners could easily access. In addition, they wanted the overall API adoption experience to be self-serve in a seamless, fast-paced fashion, and to migrate their existing users to the new platform.

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🔗The Solution

We implemented a developer portal with a team of one developer and later one designer from Webstack Builders as well as one Product Manager on the client team. We began the project by first migrating a newer offering from the company (a direct-to-store logistics network) to the API edge proxy, as a large customer of that service had a pressing need in order to grow further with our client.

API migration involved ingesting existing endpoints into Apigee from WSDL documentation, and working with internal stakeholders of the client to improve the auto-generated OpenAPI Specification documentation generated by Apigee’s build tooling. A comprehensive test suite for each end point was created using SoapUI, and the behavior of each proxied REST endpoint verified for correctness. Client SDKs were generated for each API product bundle using Swagger Codegen tooling.

We implemented a robust self-service developer platform using the Drupal enterprise CMS and various integration modules for the Apigee API proxy service maintained by Google. The portal features a custom UI to match the client’s corporate branding and enables developers to explore and test APIs, view API documentation, generate API keys, and access support resources. It features analytics and reporting capabilities to track API usage and performance, role-based access for users and administrators synced to Apigee Identity services, and traffic management to implement access limit policies.

🔗Additional Work

After acceptance of the initial scope of work, the client contracted Webstack Builders to upgrade the portal (from Drupal 8 to 9) and implement a Scorecard feature that provides top-line metrics visible to portal clients. Service scores are calculated based on Google’s DORA performance metrics:

• Lead Time for Changes (LTC) is the amount of time between a commit and production.
• Deployment Frequency (DF) is how often you ship changes, and how consistent your software delivery is.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is the average amount of time it takes your team to restore service when there’s a service disruption, like an outage.
• Change Failure Rate (CFR) is the percentage of releases that result in downtime, degraded service, or rollbacks, which can tell you how effective your team is at implementing changes.

The client used Jira for issue tracking, Jenkins to manage their CI/CD pipelines, PagerDuty for incident response management, and NewRelic for availability monitoring. Webstack Builders implemented the Webhooks Drupal module with custom logic and UI to display computed scores for Service Maturity, Production Readiness, and Security Standards compliance for each API product group.

🔗Tools & Technologies

• Drupal 8/9 Apigee Kickstart enterprise CMS
• Google Apigee Edge high-performance API proxy
• Apigee SmartDocs integrated with the developer platform
• Swagger Codegen and Editor libraries
• SoapUI API testing framework

🔗The Results

• Delivered a 100% self-service portal for the client’s customers and partners who can now perform all tasks without human intervention
• Onboarding new customers and partners has been made made quicker, easier and less expensive
• Improved API governance, control over who can access the API, ability to set usage limits, monitor usage analytics, and enforce security policies

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