I don’t need to think about KrakenD, it just works. – Dave McPherson, Platform Engineering Lead
As Culture Amp scaled, managing API traffic efficiently became a critical need. The company sought an API gateway that could:
- Route traffic to upstream services efficiently.
- Validate authenticated requests.
- Protect upstream services using throttling and circuit breakers.
- Manipulate requests and responses when necessary.
- Provide centralized, coarse-grained observability of external-facing APIs.
Why KrakenD?
Culture Amp chose KrakenD because of its lightweight, high-performance architecture and powerful feature set. The ability to configure everything through simple declarative settings, without introducing unnecessary complexity, made it an ideal choice.
Implementation & Integration at Culture Amp
KrakenD was seamlessly integrated into Culture Amp’s infrastructure, acting as the primary gateway for external API traffic. Some key aspects of the implementation included:
- Traffic management: Efficient routing and request validation ensured smooth API operations.
- Observability: KrakenD provided visibility into API behavior, aiding in monitoring and troubleshooting.
- Customization: A custom plugin for feature-flag-based traffic shaping allowed for greater flexibility in API traffic control.
Over time, KrakenD’s stability and ease of configuration minimized operational overhead, letting the engineering team focus on building and improving services rather than maintaining the API gateway.
Results after 2 years in production
With over two years of production use, KrakenD has proven to be a reliable solution for Culture Amp’s API management. The key benefits include:
- Increased developer velocity: Simplified API management and reduced maintenance overhead enabled developers to move faster.
- Reliable routing: KrakenD ensured efficient and predictable traffic flow to upstream services.
- Operational stability: Thanks to its built-in features like circuit breakers and throttling, the API gateway contributed to improved resilience and uptime.
Future Plans
Looking ahead, Culture Amp plans to further optimize API performance by:
- Exploring caching to improve response times.
- Implementing an advanced circuit breaker for even greater resilience.
What Culture Amp Loves About KrakenD
For Culture Amp, KrakenD’s reliability and simplicity have made it an indispensable part of their API infrastructure, ensuring that their developers can focus on what matters—enhancing employee experience worldwide.
