I appreciate solutions that strike the right balance between power and simplicity. KrakenD does exactly that, and more. It’s now an integral part of our digital infrastructure.
The Challenge: Simplifying API Exposure at Scale
Within the Retail vertical, Diebold Nixdorf needed to expose a new generation of public-facing APIs. These APIs serve internal Customer Services teams and, in some cases, customers directly. The goals: fast performance, low operational overhead, and architectural flexibility.
Their existing API gateway did not align with these requirements. Procurement, onboarding, and operational costs were high. Developer adoption was slowed by complexity. The team sought a solution that could offer enterprise-grade capabilities with minimal footprint, based on modern, open standards.
Why KrakenD
KrakenD was selected as the new API gateway after careful evaluation. The key reasons:
- High performance and lean architecture, powered by Go
- Lower total cost across procurement, onboarding, and operations
- Ease of adoption by engineering teams
- Built-in support for industry standards like OpenAPI, gRPC, WebSockets, and more
- Plugin model to address custom enterprise use cases
- Strong early support from the KrakenD team during the PoC phase
KrakenD has been a game-changer for our API architecture. As an API gateway solution, it delivers exceptional performance, scalability, and flexibility, all without adding unnecessary complexity to our stack. What impressed us most was how quickly we could deploy and configure it to suit our evolving business needs.
The Solution: A Dedicated Public API Platform
Diebold Nixdorf’s Retail API Platform now serves as the dedicated intermediary layer between consumers and backend domains. Every interaction, whether from internal teams or customers, routes through KrakenD. The platform exposes key features of the DN Retail product line, while abstracting away internal complexity and implementation details.
All functionality is channeled through this single, stateless API layer.
Results & Next Steps
With KrakenD, we’ve significantly improved response times and reduced latency across services, resulting in a better end-user experience. The support for rate-limiting, caching, and security policies is robust and easily manageable. Its stateless, no-runtime-dependency design has also made it incredibly lightweight and reliable in production.
All APIs managed by the Retail R&D team are now fully deployed using KrakenD. Customer Services teams are progressing toward completing their migration to the same model. Once finalized, this will allow Diebold Nixdorf to fully replace its legacy API Gateway with KrakenD.
Meanwhile, Retail APIs are being rolled out to higher environments based on customer needs, with a full production deployment planned by year-end. New feature development continues to evolve on the KrakenD-powered Public API Layer.
What the Team Appreciated Most
- Written in Go, delivering excellent performance with minimal overhead
- Open-source foundation and plugin support for tailored extensions
- Support from the KrakenD team and community during critical implementation phases
- Docker-based deployment and environment portability
