Helios Towers Business Goals
The key business objective is to build an API ecosystem and provide a centralized hub for the organization to host and manage the APIs.
Helios Towers (HT) is a market-leading telecommunications infrastructure company, having established one of the most extensive tower portfolios across Africa. HT builds, owns and operates telecoms passive infrastructure, enabling mobile operators to roll out efficiently and enhance coverage, and improve network access across their markets.
Helios Towers offer a comprehensive passive infrastructure solution as service that includes site selection and preparation, maintenance, security, power management, and hosting of active equipment.
Technology Challenges
- Delays in field engineer access management
- Get Real time data about sites, projects and assets
- Spiraling cost of existing API platform
- Complex API code to manage
- Longer duration to change and release changes
- Lean team to manage lot of complex code
- Limited time frame to migrate off the incumbent platform to Kong
How NeosAlpha helped
Engagement: Migration to Kong APIM with Microservices Architecture
As part of this digital transformation engagement with NeosAlpha, we performed a full architecture discovery and analysis of HT existing landscape and identified the key areas where quick wins can be realized with the Kong platform without disturbing the business day-today operations. We went through three phases,
- Discovery
- Implementation and Support
- Zero Downtime Migration
End result? We were able to migrate all business critical integrations and APIs off from MuleSoft into Kong under 3 months with a lean team.
Discovery
In the discovery phase we delved into the architecture components and the key requirements to be met in this migration, some of the key activities are listed below
- Existing architecture landscape limitations
- To-Be Architectural needs
- InfoSecurity requirements
- Key requirements to be met as part of the delivery
- Like zero impact on API keys
- Ability to execute the migration before the license expiry
- Near-Zero downtime migration from legacy to Kong platform
Implementation and Support
As part of implementation, we had to analyze the existing MuleSoft bundles, reverse engineer the code and redesign it in microservices based architecture.
- Analyze existing code base and produce documentation of APIs
- Produce better performance design for new implementation
- Walk through the document with Helios Towers stakeholders for approvals
- Build the APIs using Kong and SpringBoot Microservices
- Provide postman collection as test pack
- Support UAT testing
Zero Downtime Migration
One of the key requirements was to have minimal to no impact on day to day operations. We worked closely with HeliosTowers and achieved a near-zero downtime migration of their production traffic.
- Deploy Kong and Spring Boot microservices to production
- Migrate production API keys to Kong
- Switch the traffic from Mule to Kong with near-zero-downtime impact on business transactions
- Monitor the health of the platform for live traffic
- Warranty support post go live
- De-commission of MuleSoft platform
Results
- Successfully migrate off MuleSoft to Kong within the migration timeline, eliminating significant license spend
- Able to fetch real-time information about assets and site with newly rearchitected solution
- Smooth migration with zero impact to business traffic
- A flexible and scalable platform to meet their future growth needs
