“Drawing from API7's use cases in the automotive industry, Lotus Cars utilizes API7 Enterprise to manage core traffic, accelerate product delivery, and optimize time to market, all while reducing manpower and saving costs.”
from POC to production
in operation and maintenance
Established in 1948, Lotus Cars is a renowned British automotive company headquartered in England, specializing in producing sports cars and racing cars known for their exceptional lightweight design and superior handling capabilities.
Through seven decades of boundary-pushing heritage, Lotus Cars has conquered international markets with remarkable success.
The rapid expansion of the company brought forth issues.
Lotus Cars strives to uphold a competitive edge persistently in advancing intelligence, and electric and new-energy vehicles.
Despite excelling in brand and manufacturing processes, Lotus Cars finds itself significantly disadvantaged by the absence of competitive software technology, highlighting the urgent need for robust partnerships and solutions.
It is a significant undertaking for Lotus Cars to balance integrating smart technologies and adhering to the required safety measures and regulatory requirements.
Rather than developing an in-house solution, API7 Enterprise provides Lotus Cars with a more time-effective, cost-efficient, and less demanding solution without hiring additional manpower but providing professional technical support.
API7 Enterprise is a full API lifecycle management solution based on Apache APISIX, the best open-source API gateway. It has almost 100 available open-source plugins and can satisfy Lotus Cars' requirement of configuring plugins either on the consumers within API7 Enterprise or the global clusters. Lotus Cars emphasizes functionalities like rate limiting and circuit breaking, fallback data, allowlisting/denylisting, and API Access-Control List.
API7 Enterprises supports upstream health checks, allowing Lotus Cars to monitor the health and availability of the upstream services. API7 Enterprise can help the Infrastructure team at Lotus Cars to gain a thorough comprehension of API quantity, quality, and QPS, which empowers the company to make informed decisions regarding API management. This enhanced visibility enables the Lotus team to take proactive measures in managing and optimizing the API ecosystem, guaranteeing optimal performance, scalability, and user satisfaction.
API7 Enterprise's multi-layered networking feature empowers Lotus Cars to design and manage complex network topologies that meet their specific requirements, safeguarding its API ecosystem effectively and realizing reliable security control.
An active community is crucial for API Gateway to keep up with the pace of technological evolution. Being API7 Enterprise's foundation, Apache APISIX has been active in its community when it was an Apache incubator project, as evidenced by the number of contributors, issue response time, and pull requests.
Another important consideration for Lotus Cars is the desire to support multiple Kubernetes and Nacos clusters for service discovery. By incorporating support for multiple clusters, API7 Enterprise provides Lotus Cars with the flexibility to manage and discover services across different clusters. This capability enhances the scalability and adaptability of their API infrastructure.
Lotus Cars accelerated the launch of the API gateway system to the production environment from a projected 2 quarters to a remarkable timeframe of only 1 month.
By adopting API7 Enterprise, Lotus Cars achieved an astounding 90% annual cost reduction in operation and maintenance, including vital tasks like upgrades and bug fixes.
Lotus Cars established its internal API landscape from 0 to 1, providing valuable insights into managing the quality and quantity of APIs and making market predictions.
APISIX helped us greatly improve service quality under active-active architecture. Its complete monitoring feature has effectively supported troubleshooting, and updating the service list has become very simple.
To fix the problem of inconvenient service management and costly R&D investment, we introduced APISIX as our API gateway. APISIX's dynamic performance with etcd aligns most with Beeto's product requirements.
Apache APISIX supports multiple protocols, saving great R&D costs and endowing our platform with endless vitality.