National-Scale API Management Platform

Designing and Operating a National API Management Platform

The challenge

A national body needed to build an API management platform that would serve as the primary integration layer for hundreds of organisations and thousands of developers. The platform had to accommodate both internal “API producers” publishing services and external “API consumers” integrating with them, across a wide range of technical maturity levels.

What we did

Aire Logic designed and built the platform from inception, selecting Google Apigee as the API gateway after a structured vendor evaluation that included AWS API Gateway, Kong, and MuleSoft. The backend comprised Apigee Edge combined with AWS-hosted components for custom behaviour, with Docker containers deployed on Amazon ECS. Infrastructure was managed through Terraform and Azure Pipelines, with GitHub as the source control layer. The platform grew to support over 15 active development teams working on production APIs.

Scale and operations

The platform processed over 1.6 billion consumer transactions in total. It operated under a Platinum SLA with 24/7 on-call cover, full incident management through Splunk, and automated disaster recovery procedures capable of fast redeployment. Monitoring across Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus provided latency, availability, and error rate visibility.

Developer experience

Aire Logic led the developer experience alongside the technical platform, building and iterating the developer portal, onboarding documentation, and a digital onboarding service that replaced a paper-based supplier conformance process. Time to onboard a new API consumer was cut from several months to under three months. Cost per integration was brought below £100,000. The work covered the full API lifecycle: definition, publication, versioning, deprecation, and retirement, with formal multi-stakeholder governance at each stage.