Why America’s Leading Mortgage Technology Provider Runs its Business on Apigee
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Black Knight is a leading provider of technology, data, and analytics to the mortgage industry, catering to both large and mid-tier banks in the United States. Over the past few decades, we tended to manage customer integrations on a case-by-case basis. Whenever a bank needed to connect with a Black Knight app, we’d launch another integration project. Lather, rinse, repeat. Needless to say, this was inefficient; we knew we had to do something to centralize this process.
Building versus buying an API management platform
To start, we created some homegrown API solutions. Despite being largely successful with one of these solutions, we saw that technology advances were outpacing our capacity to update our solutions in-house. We knew we needed to move toward an API platform that would support RESTful architecture and that would fully enable mobile solutions. It also had to be extremely secure. Knowing how complicated such a platform would be to build ourselves, we decided that our developers were better off focusing on providing core solutions to Black Knight clients; engaging with an outside provider was the right way for us to advance our API strategy.
After a lengthy proof-of-concept process, we went into production with the Apigee API Management Platform from Google Cloud in 2018. In our opinion, Apigee was the most complete, robust, technically sound and full-featured option from among all of the API management tools we evaluated. Its ease of use was the deciding factor for our developers, and the Apigee analytics capabilities provided considerable insight into the anatomy of an API call—something the other platforms we considered didn’t do as well.
Choosing Apigee meant that we didn’t have to focus on developing and maintaining a tool or spend enormous amounts of money trying to keep up with security patching. For a large company like Black Knight, an API management tool is something we don’t want to spend a lot of time on. We know that Google Cloud devotes tremendous resources to it, and it would be difficult to replicate that in-house.
Black Knight has more than 150 client-facing applications. Almost half of them now are built with APIs that are externally facing, and many of these apps use APIs that integrated with other Black Knight applications. Add to that the huge number of applications out there that come from clients and third-party vendors, and suddenly, we had a management challenge from an API perspective.
Driving cultural change
We came to Apigee with the goal of containing and empowering our huge ecosystem of APIs, customers, third parties, and internal users.
Given Black Knight’s size, our developers and customers understandably each have different business goals, so getting everyone to come to a centralized platform is a great opportunity. My role is to help people consider other options so they can be open to the benefits that Apigee brings us.
Now that we’ve engaged with Apigee for over a year, we see two big benefits. First, the huge reduction in point-to-point integrations has produced tremendous efficiencies for us and our customers, who now get instant integration once they’ve been authorized for a particular API. Second, Apigee’s capacity for mobile enablement lets us satisfy our customers’ needs for secure mobile apps.
Simplifying security
From a technical perspective, security is complicated for mobile apps. We’re often accessing sensitive information on a mobile device that can’t always be trusted. This kind of scenario requires us to implement a number of security precautions to help ensure confidential information remains protected.
The Apigee API management platform addresses these needs in the simplest way possible. It solves complex problems related to security without having to deploy a new API proxy each time we need to support a particular mobile device upgrade. Our back-end applications remain protected because Apigee helps manage security, requests, access tokens, and authorizations. Today, our back-end applications work with Apigee to communicate with mobile devices or servers coming over the internet.
Apigee has also enabled us to do a better job sharing a variety of APIs. The developer portal lets us stitch together APIs and get more creative about how we can innovate and build new solutions based on these collections of APIs. At this point, anybody that has a nondisclosure agreement with us can register for the developer portal. The nature of our business is such that we can’t just open up our APIs to anybody, but it’s available to our contracted third parties.
Our Apigee journey has been exciting, and we’re making great progress. I’m looking forward to what innovations we will come up with next, thanks to the way Apigee enables us to create, implement, and deliver.
Meet the 8 Sponsors of 2021 State of DevOps Reports
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Google Cloud and the DORA research team are excited to announce our eight sponsors for the 2021 State of DevOps report. We recently launched the 2021 State of DevOps survey, a 25-min survey for the DevOps community to share how they are using DevOps to improve software delivery performance. So if you haven’t taken the survey yet, this is your chance!
For those unfamiliar with the State Of DevOps report, it is the largest and longest running research of its kind. It provides an independent view into how teams and companies can drive powerful business outcomes, no matter what stage of the DevOps journey
With the State of DevOps reports we aim to capture how teams and companies are driving excellence in technology delivery through the implementation of DevOps practices, no matter what stage of the DevOps journey your team is in. If you’re wondering how your team measures up in your industry take our DevOps Quick Check and discover which capabilities you should focus on to improve your performance.
To capture a diverse array of information on how those in the DevOps community are performing, our eight sponsors of the 2021 State of DevOps survey are focussed on helping organizations of all sizes and industries to develop and deliver software faster across the whole DevOps lifecycle. Captured below, you’ll find more information on our sponsors for this year and why they chose to sponsor the State Of the DevOps 2021 Report.
Armory enables enterprise companies to ship better software, faster through trusted, reliable, safe, and secure deployments — at its core, Armory is powered by Spinnaker OSS.
“Armory exists to unlock innovation through software. To achieve this, we help enterprises reliably deploy software at scale, naturally aligning with DevOps practices to improve software delivery performance. Given this, we applaud efforts like the State of DevOps Report that provides an independent view into the practices and capabilities that organizations can employ to drive better performance.”
Carl Timm, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Armory
The world’s best software teams deliver quality code, confidently, with CircleCI. The world’s best software teams use CircleCI to go from next-up to feature shipped, at the speed ambitious businesses require.
“Though the DevOps space is only over a decade old, it moves incredibly quickly. Google’s State of DevOps report is both a reflection and projection of the industry, capturing how DevOps culture drives business results and where DevOps practitioners can look to improve. At CircleCI, we rely heavily on this survey data to glean valuable insights into our market and our customers overall. We also build upon these insights to guide our own research into how engineering teams move code through pipelines in our annual State of Software Delivery report. Taken together, this research highlights teams’ reported and actual behavior and paints a vibrant picture of how technology-driven organizations drive for success.”
Emma Webb, VP, Corporate Communications, CircleCI
Continuous Delivery Foundation
CD Foundation is an open-source community improving the world’s ability to deliver software with security and speed.
“Good decision-making is based on good data. Open source is a critical piece of the technology roadmap for DevOps, and the 2021 State of DevOps Report will provide actionable information for high performing teams in organizations of all types and sizes. The report will show where open source and DevOps intersect, and in a space that is changing so quickly, new relevant data is critical,” said Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation Executive Director. “CD Foundation members are deeply involved with producing this annual report, with over 10 years of historic research. Thank you to Google and our other members who have worked so hard on it. This report is a tangible result of working together.”
Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation Executive Director
Deloitte provides audit and assurance, tax, consulting, and risk and financial advisory services to a broad cross-section of the largest corporations and governmental agencies. At Deloitte, they are continuously evolving how they work and how they look at marketplace challenges so they can continually deliver measurable, sustainable results for their clients and communities.
“Software delivery is evolving rapidly and we know our customers need unique and compelling insights to make the right decisions. State of DevOps is a widely used report and considered as an Industry standard to understand the drivers for excellence in Software Development and Delivery. Deloitte is excited to help the team at DORA and Google Cloud in publishing this report through our sponsoring since we believe the insights from this report will help make software delivery better.”
Manoj Mishra, Consulting Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP
GitLab is the open DevOps platform built from the ground up as a single application for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle enabling Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project.
“We’re happy to sponsor the DORA Report and the vital work behind it. The more we understand the DevOps journey, the better we and our GitLab community can contribute to its future. We’re particularly interested to see this year’s results and the impact COVID-19 and remote work have had on DevOps. We appreciate the chance to be part of this exciting, informative process.”
Brendon O’Leary, Senior Developer Evangelist
Liquibase helps millions of developers easily manage database schema changes by enabling teams to track, version, and deploy database changes by delivering on the promise of CI/CD for the database.
“With their rigorous methodology, the DORA research team delivers actionable information with the simple goal of helping organizations of any size accelerate the development and delivery of software. Liquibase is honored to sponsor the 2021 State of DevOps Report and its role in helping so many organizations build value for their customers and shareholders”
Matt Geise, VP of Marketing at Liquibase
PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform that empowers the right action, when seconds matter.
“As a leader in digital operations management, PagerDuty is proud to sponsor this year’s report as it aligns with our dedication to helping DevOps professionals make better decisions. This report will inform tech and business leaders about the trends/challenges developers are facing and the opportunities there are to accelerate their own DevOps transformation.”
Carolyn Guss, VP of Corporate Marketing
Sysdig is driving the secure DevOps movement, empowering organizations to confidently secure containers, Kubernetes and cloud.
“There is a learning curve with all new technology, cloud is no exception. Learning from mistakes and sharing best practices is how we will ultimately ship secure applications, faster. For seven years, DORA and Google have partnered to understand the State of DevOps to help vendors and cloud practitioners to learn from each other and implement standards for best practices,”
Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig
Google Cloud, the DORA team, and our sponsors are very excited about this year’s report. We look forward to hearing from you, your colleagues, and networks about how DevOps is integrated into your workflow and ways we can help to further improve your performance. Please share your experience with software delivery by completing our survey that will be used to foster the next generation of DevOps best practices. To provide ample time for the DevOps community to contribute to this industry wide report we have extended the deadline for the survey until July 2nd.
Thank you to everyone who has participated so far, and the Google Cloud DORA team looks forward to hearing from even more of you soon!
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After eight years in existence, Pinterest had grown into 1,000 microservices and multiple layers of infrastructure and diverse set-up tools and platforms.
In 2016 the company launched a roadmap towards a new computing platform, led by the vision of creating the fastest path from an idea to production, without making engineers worry about the underlying infrastructure.
The first phase involved moving services to Docker containers. Once these services went into production in early 2017, the team began looking at orchestration to help create efficiencies and manage them in a decentralized way. After an evaluation of various solutions, Pinterest went with Kubernetes.
“By moving to Kubernetes, the team was able to build on-demand scaling and new failover policies, in addition to simplifying the overall deployment and management of a complicated piece of infrastructure such as Jenkins,” says Micheal Benedict, Product Manager for the Cloud and the Data Infrastructure Group at Pinterest.
Using Kubernetes, Pinterest was able to significantly boot It efficiency.
“We not only saw reduced build times but also huge efficiency wins. For instance, the team reclaimed over 80 percent of capacity during non-peak hours. As a result, the Jenkins Kubernetes cluster now uses 30 percent less instance-hours per-day when compared to the previous static cluster.”
Download the full case study to get greater insights into how Pinterest is simplifying its IT infrastructure by leveraging Kubernetes.
2,602 Uses of AI for Social Good, and What We Learned from Them
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For the past few years, we’ve applied core Google AI research and engineering to projects with positive societal impact, including forecasting floods, protecting whales and predicting famine. Artificial intelligence has incredible potential to address big social, humanitarian and environmental problems, but in order to achieve this potential, it needs to be accessible to organizations already making strides in these areas. So, the Google AI Impact Challenge, which kicked off in October 2018, was our open call to organizations around the world to submit their ideas for how they could use AI to help address societal challenges.
“Accelerating social good with artificial intelligence” sheds light on the range of organizations using AI to address big problems. It also identifies several trends around the opportunities and challenges related to using AI for social good. Here are some of the things we learned—check out the report for more details.
AI is globally relevant
We received 2,602 applications from six continents and 119 countries, with projects addressing a wide range of issue areas, from education to the environment. Some of the applicants had experience with AI, but 55 percent of not-for-profit organizations and 40 percent of for-profit social enterprises reported no prior experience with AI.
Similar projects can benefit from shared resources
When we reviewed all the applications, we saw that many people are trying to tackle the same problems and are even using the same approaches to do so. For example, we received more than 30 applications proposing to use AI to identify and manage agricultural pests. The report includes a list of common project submissions, which will hopefully encourage people to collaborate and share resources with others working to solve similar problems.
You don’t need to be an expert to use AI for social good
AI is becoming more accessible as new machine learning libraries and other open-source tools, such as Tensorflow and ML Kit, reduce the technical expertise required to implement AI. Organizations no longer need someone with a deep background in AI, and they don’t have to start from scratch. More than 70 percent of submissions, across all sectors and organization types, used existing AI frameworks to tackle their proposed challenge.
Successful projects combine technical ability with sector expertise
Few organizations had both the social sector and AI technical expertise to successfully design and implement their projects from start to finish. The most comprehensive applications established partnerships between nonprofits with deep sector expertise, and academic institutions or technology companies with technical experience.
ML isn’t the only answer
Some problems can be addressed by using alternative methods to AI—and result in faster, simpler and cheaper execution. For example, several organizations proposed using machine learning to match underserved populations to legal knowledge and tools. While AI could be helpful, similar results could be achieved through a well-designed website. While we’ve seen the impact AI can have in solving big problems, you shouldn’t rule out more simple approaches as well.
Global momentum around AI for social good is growing—and many organizations are already using AI to address a wide array of societal challenges. As more social sector organizations recognize AI’s potential, we all have a role to play in supporting their work for a better world.
Google Cloud Next ’22 to Commence in October: Block Your Calendar!
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We’re excited to announce that Google Cloud Next returns on October 11–13, 2022.
Join us for keynotes from industry luminaries and engage live with Google developers. Explore dynamic content across various learning levels, and dive deep into technologies and solutions spanning the Google Cloud and Google Workspace portfolios. Participate in breakout sessions, demos, and hands-on training. Hear from the world’s leading companies about their digital transformation journeys. You’ll have opportunities to connect with experts, get inspired, and boost your skills. We can’t wait to see you at Next ’22!
It’s too early to determine how the event experience will span the digital and physical worlds, so please stay tuned for updates as we plan with the health and safety of the attendees in mind. In the meantime, mark October 11–13 in your calendar, and visit our event site for updates. For more inspiration, rediscover Next ’21, now available on demand.
Expert Takeaways on API Strategies from The State of API Economy 2021 Report
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Did you know API traffic for Apigee customers increased 46% year-over-year, to 2.21 trillion calls, between 2019 and 2020? If you have more questions on APIs trends and their role in disrupting enterprises digitally, you can catch up on key take aways from the Google Cloud’s State of API Economy 2021 report and insights from Google’s experts on API-best practices.
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