About Our Client
Founded in Edinburgh in 1923, WoodMac evolved from a stockbroking firm into a leading authority on energy market intelligence. Today, with a global team of over 2,500 experts and a presence in more than 30 countries, WoodMac continues to support governments, investors, and enterprises in achieving sustainable growth and resilience in an ever-changing energy landscape. With a legacy spanning over 50 years, WoodMac has built a reputation for delivering trusted intelligence that helps organizations navigate the complexities of the global energy transition.
Business Objective
Wood Mackenzie wanted to migrate its API infrastructure from a Kong Enterprise deployment hosted on Verisk’s system to an independently self-managed environment. The primary goal was to transition the 50 API workspaces to the Kong Konnect SaaS platform with zero disruption to ongoing operations. Additionally, Wood Mackenzie aimed to streamline API consumer management by integrating its identity provider for secure access control. The migration was critical for achieving complete infrastructure independence and operational continuity.
Challenges Faced by Wood Mackenzie
The separation of Wood Mackenzie to Veritas Capital raised numerous challenges, including:
- Migration of 54 workspaces from Kong Enterprise to Kong Konnect without affecting ongoing business operations.
- Decoupling of heavily customized scripts and deeply integrated components that were tied to legacy environments.
- Required to execute the entire migration under strict deadlines with a lean team and cost constraints.
- Preserving functionality while migrating all API configuration, including routes, services, plugins, and consumers, with the same code base.
- Digital transformation of the API Gateway by moving to a scalable, cloud-native solution.
How NeosAlpha Helped?
As a Kong partner, we analysed Wood Mackenzie’s requirements and created a comprehensive design for a smooth migration process from Kong Enterprise Gateway to the Kong Konnect SaaS platform.
1. Built Custom Kong Golden Image
Aligning the golden image with existing features involved connecting to Prometheus and an S3 Bucket through a copy and adjusting the definitions of the existing Data Planes. Custom plugins were also aligned with Kong Connect.
2. Collaboration with Over 10+ Teams
Considering different workspace owners with their workspace pipelines, NeosAlpha aligned their scripts to integrate with the new Konnect Platform seamlessly. This involved identifying various workspace owners, aligning the changes with them, and obtaining the necessary approvals.
3. Automated Consumer Onboarding
We also integrated IDP for Single Sign-On (SSO) and mapped the groups to Konnect. Integration of two primary tools with the Konnect platform facilitated the onboarding and offboarding of consumers to/from the IDP tenant. These consumers were automatically synchronized or unsynchronized with their credentials on the Konnect Platform.
4. Analyzed and Updated Custom Scripting
As part of the engagement, we had to review over 1000 lines of code already written in their setup and make necessary changes to work with the Kong Konnect platform.
Key Migration Tasks
Following are the key steps performed by NeosAlpha’s Kong team
- Analyzing and transforming configurations of 56 existing workspaces into the Kong Deck 3.0 format. Ensuring the declarative Kong files are validated for synchronization with the Kong Konnect platform.
- Migrating all RBAC roles and users to the Konnect Platform using a dedicated migration script.
- Identifying and designing the necessary components for runtime groups and PAT tokens.
- Data Plane Migration Planning:
- Designing and developing data plane migration processes.
- Creating automation scripts for data plane migration.
- Establishing an overall migration plan, including:
- Determining the order of runtime groups to be migrated.
- Defining change windows for each runtime group.
- Identifying the physical data planes associated with each runtime group.
- Developing a playbook for utilizing automation in RBAC, entity, and data plane migration.
- Establishing rollback points and procedures.
Technology Stack
- Kong Enterprise & Kong Konnect SaaS
- AWS S3 & Prometheus
- Custom Golden Image
- Shell/Python Scripts
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Identity Provider (SSO)
- RBAC & PAT Token Automation
Results
As a Kong Partner, we ensured the successful migration of all Wood Mackenzie workspaces to Kong Konnect without disrupting ongoing business operations.
- Successfully migrated 54 workspaces from Kong Enterprise to Kong Konnect with zero downtime.
- Successfully provided infrastructure independence to have complete control over its API ecosystem.
- Shifted to a cloud-native SaaS solution to enhance scalability, manageability, and long-term flexibility.
- Designed and executed a structured plan to migrate data planes, including automation, change windows, rollback strategies, etc.
- Improved security and access control by enabling automated onboarding and offboarding of API consumers.
- Completed the complex migration within a constrained timeline and resource bandwidth, avoiding potential commercial impact.
