Navigating the Digital Seas: API7 Enterprise Drives Seaport's Digitalization

Overview

About

This leading seaport is a versatile and comprehensive deep-water facility that integrates rivers, estuaries, and sea ports in Asia. It has ranked first in cargo throughput among global ports for 14 consecutive years and ranked third in container throughput among global ports for five consecutive years.

In 2022, this leading seaport group achieved extraordinary milestones, handling a staggering 1.04 billion tons of cargo-an impressive 3.7% year-on-year growth. Equally remarkable, the port processed 40.73 million TEUs, reflecting a robust 7.3% increase in container throughput.

Challenges

• The absence of a centralized authentication framework resulted in inconsistent security measures, heightening the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.

• Disparate systems created data silos, complicating data integration and hindering efficient decision-making necessary for automation and intelligence.

• The legacy system struggled to handle increasing traffic, especially during peak concurrent usage, leading to slow response times and degraded user experience.

• As business demands grew, the traditional architecture lacked the flexibility to scale efficiently, hindering meeting fluctuating operational requirements.

Results

• Realized real-time system configuration updating without restarting port services or interrupting port operations, enhancing overall availability and stability.

• Achieved visual gateway management using API7 Enterprise dashboard, saving time and reducing management costs while improving system administration convenience.

• Implemented centralized identity authentication management, reducing repeated authentication implementation in different services, and leading to streamlined authentication processes and enhanced security.

Background

The infrastructure department at this seaport group is committed to applying advanced internet and high technologies including cloud computing, big data, IoT, mobile internet, and AI to construct traditional ports and logistics transmission, aiming to enhance the automation and intelligence of the port.

API gateways play a crucial role in this process by managing and routing traffic between different systems and services. They ensure secure, efficient, and scalable communication, which is essential for integrating the various IoT devices, platforms, and applications involved in the digital transformation of the port. By enabling smooth data flow and enforcing security protocols, API gateways contribute to the overall goal of improving the port's operational efficiency and reducing manual intervention.

Why Choose API7 Enterprise?

API7 Enterprise stood out for several key reasons, especially when compared to traditional NGINX-based solutions.

Unified Technology Stack

The seaport group's previous technology stack was built around NGINX, and API7 Enterprise shares the same basis. Consequently, the migration process from NGINX to API7 Enterprise is streamlined, making it highly efficient and reducing potential downtime.

The uniformity simplifies the integration of API7 Enterprise into existing projects, allowing for quick adoption. Such consistency in the underlying infrastructure also ensures a smooth transition with minimal disruptions to ongoing operations.

High Performance

API7 Enterprise, built on Apache APISIX, is renowned for delivering exceptional performance and stability. It can handle up to 23,000 queries per second (QPS) per CPU core, with a minimal latency of 0.6 milliseconds, making it ideal for high-throughput environments. For this leading seaport group, where QPS demands are moderate, API7 Enterprise easily meets performance requirements while providing the flexibility to scale as needed.

Moreover, API7 Enterprise's resilient architecture guarantees smooth service operation, ensuring high availability and minimizing latency-related disruptions. This combination of performance and reliability makes API7 Enterprise a top choice for businesses seeking efficient, scalable API management.

Visual Gateway Management Dashboard

The API7 Enterprise dashboard offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface that streamlines the management of routes, upstream services, and plugins. By providing a visual, interactive dashboard, it simplifies complex tasks, enabling users to easily configure, monitor, and troubleshoot the API gateway. This enhanced accessibility and efficiency significantly reduce the operational overhead, making daily API management faster and more efficient for teams.

Mature Cluster Deployment and High Availability

API7 Enterprise provides robust and reliable cluster deployment solutions, designed to ensure high availability and seamless scalability. By distributing traffic efficiently across multiple nodes, it offers resilience against node failures and guarantees uninterrupted service. This architecture allows API7 Enterprise to handle high traffic volumes, making it ideal for large-scale deployments. Its fault-tolerant design and ability to dynamically scale resources ensure smooth operations even under heavy loads, providing enterprises with a stable and scalable API management solution.

Extensive Case Studies

API7 Enterprise offers a diverse set of case studies from a wide range of industries, serving as insightful references for new users. These real-world examples highlight the platform's flexibility and proven reliability, demonstrating how it effectively adapts to various use cases. Whether it's improving API management for on-premise, multi-cloud, or hybrid cloud environments, API7's versatility makes it a reliable solution for businesses across different sectors.

Centralized Traffic Management Platform

This top seaport group offers a comprehensive digital invoicing service, enhancing operational efficiency and enabling digital transformation for businesses. Additionally, the group is developing intermodal transport that allows all freight transportation procedures to be managed with a single transport document. This initiative can save clients approximately 4.5 million US dollors in remote booking costs annually and reduce total freight costs by 30%.

Furthermore, the Seaport EDI Center at the seaport group is responsible for processing and managing electronic data within the port, including orders, freight information, and customs declarations. It provides real-time freight information, helping port managers and shippers monitor cargo movements and optimize logistics plans.

Leveraging API7 Enterprise as the centralized traffic entry point, this leading seaport group effectively manages the flow of data across all its business applications. By consolidating traffic management through API7 Enterprise, the Group can efficiently monitor and control data transmission, leading to improved responsiveness and reliability in its services.

Below is the infrastructure architecture of this seaport group using API7 Enterprise.

The API7 DP (Data Plane) serves as the core component responsible for handling the incoming API requests and responses. It provides essential functionalities, such as routing, load balancing, and security enforcement, ensuring the smooth and efficient flow of traffic across different services.

The API7 CP (Control Plane) component takes on administrative responsibilities, managing the configuration, policies, and lifecycle of the API services. This centralized control allows the organization to maintain consistent governance and oversight over the API-driven ecosystem.

By leveraging the API7 Enterprise platform, this leading seaport group can establish a unified and well-managed API infrastructure. This approach enables the organization to centralize the control and oversight of its API services, ensuring reliable, secure, and scalable access for its clients. The seamless integration of various components, such as the etcd cluster, Prometheus Federation, and OpenSearch, further enhances the platform's capabilities, allowing for comprehensive monitoring, configuration management, and data-driven decision-making.

Achievements after Using API7 Enterprise

Stable Performance and Enhanced Operation

Since this top seaport group migrated to API7 Enterprise at the end of 2023, API7 Enterprise has consistently delivered outstanding performance and ensured the smooth and stable operation of the company's business activities. This transition has significantly enhanced the port’s ability to manage its vast logistics and traffic systems, contributing to uninterrupted services and operational stability throughout 2024, a year marked by notable achievements for this leading seaport group.

Seamless and Real-Time Updates

Previously, when this seaport group was using NGINX, making any route modifications or additions required manual intervention by logging into the server, followed by a restart for the changes to take effect. This process frequently causes disruptions to business operations.

However, with the adoption of API7 Enterprise, these challenges have been eliminated. Thanks to API7 Enterprise's hot-reloading feature, configuration changes now take effect instantly without requiring a restart. This seamless approach ensures continuous business operations with zero downtime and no impact on departmental workflows, significantly enhancing efficiency and flexibility.

Simplified API Gateway Management

With API7 Enterprise, the port company uses the visual gateway management interface to eliminate frequent logs into servers to manage routes. Instead, administrators can make real-time adjustments through the management interface, saving time and reducing management costs. This greatly improves the convenience and efficiency of system management at seaports.

Centralized Identity Authentication

API7 Enterprise offers a range of authentication plugins, such as key-auth, basic-auth, jwt-auth, etc. It also offers extensive documentation for its integrated plugins, making them easy to learn and implement. Therefore, with the minimal learning curve of using these plugins, the technical team realized unified identity authentication at the gateway layer using the jwt-auth plugin.

This centralized approach reduced code redundancy, mitigated security risks, and ensured that all services adhered to consistent security standards. It not only boosted security but also simplified management, reducing the need for developers to implement identity authentication across different services.

Summary

This leading seaport group has significantly improved its operational efficiency and agility with the adoption of API7 Enterprise. API7 Enterprise has played a pivotal role in supporting this port group in the digital transformation and the construction of digital invoicing services, intermodal transport, and Seaport EDI Center, enabling efficient responses to evolving business demands while laying a solid foundation for future expansion and innovation.