Smals | Innovating APIs for the Belgium Government

A solution architect at Smals explains how his company used Amplify API Management to create a new, API-centric platform that modernizes IT and spurs innovation for the Belgian government.

Smals is a Belgian company specializing in delivering ICT (Information and Communication Technology) solutions for the government, social and healthcare organizations, and public services that need IT services. As a participant in an initiative for creating a private cloud that is specifically for the Belgian government, Smals hosts a service platform and API gateway services.

“Because our catalog of services is growing, and the number of clients is growing fast with a significant cost in hosting and protecting these APIs that exist, the main goals is to go for a cost reduction for a more efficient platform to host the APIs.”

In addition, Smals needed to move to the new platform without impacting existing consumers and providers using its current services. “We needed a platform that was flexible and that could expose the same functionalities, the same interfaces, but modernizing how it’s implemented internally.”

Smals has a long history of exchanging information and data through services, from SOAP-based web services to service-oriented architectures, to RESTful APIs. To leverage modern technologies and security protocols while offering greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the company turned to the Amplify API Management platform from Axway.

“Amplify API Management proves we can transparently migrate our legacy services and implement new services faster,” he said. So far, over 50% of Smals’ healthcare APIs have been migrated to the Axway solution. “We have to do it in a controlled way because it’s a high-availability platform,” he explains. “We have integrations with software from medicine pharmacists that have to run 24/7, so we’re doing the migration steadily to the new platform.”

The API-driven platform currently encompasses: — 5 datacenters — 24 tenants — 834 compute nodes — 7,843 virtual machines — 8,039 docker containers — 400-500 requests per second at peak times — 35M requests per day.

Looking ahead, scalability will be key to driving innovation with real-time information for e-Government. “We have to further to handle 1,000, 2 000 requests a second.”

After finalizing the API migration, Smals will shut down the old platform and just run on the new solution, which will be offered to new partners as a service on the G cloud platform.

Read more about API Gateways in the modern enterprise on the Axway blog.