Santalucía: migration of APIs and processes to APIQuality
In this success story, we explore how we managed to improve API quality and deployment automation for Santalucía.
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Introduction
In this success story, we will explore how Santalucía, a leading insurance company that bases a fundamental part of its business on the use of APIs, began centralizing its API tools in API Quality, achieving improvements in the process of streamlining quality and security in the API world.
Santalucía knew that, to accelerate its operations, it needed to implement a cycle of APIOps. After considering a manual implementation, they opted for APIQuality, a low-code APIOps tool that promised to significantly reduce the implementation and maintenance time of these processes.
What attracted them most to APIQuality was the ease of implementing the tool and the minimal maintenance since this is the responsibility of the APIQuality team. In addition, the speed of incorporation of new functionalities allowed them to quickly integrate the latest trends in API tools, reducing implementation effort.
Another aspect that Santalucía valued was the training. The extensive training offered on the tool, along with its agreement with the APIAddicts Foundation, ensures they have a large number of professionals trained in its use.
Finally, after several experiences with vendor lock-in, Santalucía appreciated the freedom that APIQuality offered them. By implementing all the functionality in their own repositories, the tool gives them the freedom to stop using it at any timeif they so wish.
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Santalucía
Santalucía is a prominent insurance company and a leading company within the Santalucía Group.
It has over 100 years of experience in the insurance sector.
It is characterized by having developed a value proposition that allows it to comprehensively meet the protection needs of its customers, establishing a relationship with them based on closeness, trust, and excellence.
First stop: analyzing the current situation in Santalucía
Santalucía, a leader in its digital transformation strategy, has positioned itself at the forefront in the API design and development. It is not only a pioneer in the creation of these interfaces, but also in the application of techniques of DevRel, strengthening its developer portal as a key business channel.
Their API-centric approach made clear the need for a tool that would optimize its processes, reduce effort, and improve quality. Although it already used other tools and platforms on the market, Santalucía wanted to go further. It needed a tool that would speed up its workflows and automate quality and security processes as much as possible.
This is where it comes in APIQuality, an innovative APIOps tool. APIQuality enables companies to drastically reduce their API operations time and centralize the entire API lifecycle in a single platform, spanning from opportunity conception to design, development, testing, deployment, and security.
Thanks to their extensive configurable style guide with its graphical interface, APIQuality has allowed Santalucía to significantly increase the number of definition rules. This directly translates into a reduction in the time API Evangelists spend reviewing APIs.
In addition, the automatic test generation goes to enable an increase in the number of tests performed for each API, without increasing the effort, greatly facilitating the creation of regression test cycles. The ability to generate automatic mocks has promoted a strategy API-First in all its APIs, democratizing knowledge and access to them.
The challenges we face
Santalucía, a pioneer in the field of APIs, represented a challenge for our product from the outset. From the very beginning, Santalucía actively collaborated in the improvement and design of an ambitious roadmap, which enabled APIQuality to fully meet its needs and establish itself today as one of the most comprehensive tools on the market.
What we have learned from Santalucía
Model design is an inherently complex process and is often not well addressed by current tools. APIQuality stands out as one of the few solutions that allows you to manage thecomplete model life cycle, which makes it easier to control impacts in the event of any modification.
The automatic test generation, combined with the wide variety of API use cases, has allowed us to significantly improve functionality and test scenario coverage.
The system of roles and permissions has evolved to adapt to the specific needs of large enterprises. It now allows for precise management of the different roles involved in the API lifecycle phases, distributing permissions across functional areas. The integration of external and internal users adds a layer of maximum complexity, now managed with very fine-grained permission granularity.
Migration and Adaptation Process
After thoroughly reviewing the processes of Santalucía, we concluded that some kind of personalized adaptation so that Santalucía could take full advantage of the tool.
To facilitate migration without impacting the teams, we developed an automation that enabled a rapid rollover of all of Santalucía’s API clients to another platform, including their versions and models. This was crucial because it prevented disruptions to the teams’ work and enabled a high-speed migration, completed in record time while maintaining strict change control.
We then gave access to the core API team and from that point on we started a continuous monitoring process to detect possible errors and offer support in adapting to the new tool.
Once APIQuality was fully implemented, several tests were carried out training sessions for the different teams, ensuring that everyone could make effective use of the tool. Throughout this process, we had the support of the team CloudAPPi, in charge of migration, and the team of APIQuality to resolve any inconvenience.
Thanks to this thorough analysis and adaptation process, the migration could be successfully completed in a few days.
Present and future
When Santalucía started using the tool, APIQuality did not yet have the wide variety of stagespre-programmed that you have today (more than 50 available from the graphical interface, in addition to stages customized on demand).
Evolution driven by collaboration
Thanks to the collaboration with Santalucía, APIQuality has achieved a exponential evolution on its platform, rapidly incorporating new stages. This includes features such as linters, generation of stress tests and stages backward compatibility, among others.
The future with APIQuality
The future of the tool is very promising, with the Artificial intelligence as a key player. On the one hand, APIQuality already offers automatic generation of APIs, but the goal is to go further, proposing APIs from diverse sources such as documents or meeting transcripts.
Furthermore, APIQuality aims to become a tool that unifies the catalogs of synchronous and asynchronous APIs. This will allow us to consolidate two worlds that are currently often managed separately.
Improvement achieved
With the implementation of APIQuality, Santalucía has achieved the following key benefits:
Streamlining design and definition
The time spent defining and designing new APIs has been significantly reduced.
Deployment automation
The API deployment process is now fully automated.
Team integration
The incorporation of management and functional teams into the API lifecycle has been facilitated.
Better communication and organization
Communication and organization within the API lifecycle have improved considerably.
Incorporation of QA teams
Quality Assurance (QA) teams are in the process of becoming more actively involved in the API validation process.
Quality optimization
Both existing and newly created APIs have seen a significant improvement in quality.
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