The client is a prominent Indian private sector bank, headquartered in Mumbai, offering a wide range of banking and financial services. The organization was eyeing API rationalization to optimize its operations, reduce costs, enhance security and compliance, and improve the customer experience. It approached Skillmine which helped the firm embark on an extensive digital transformation journey.
Business Challenge
Case 1: There was a set of 2000 APIs hosted on DataPower (Server), without any details and functionalities (BRD, FSD, Request/Response data, Dependencies and Configuration, connectivity with DB or Government APIs like PAN and Aadhaar) on one platform.
Case 2: 1000 APIs out of 2000 APIs were in use and the rest needed to be decommissioned. However, the company was unable to figure out how to proceed.
Case 3: Management was unaware of the validations that occurred at the code base inside Microservices. The lack of technical documents prevented the management from detecting and fixing a bug-occurrence.
Solution: Approach and Methodology
Case 1: Created documents for 180 ESB services with around 1000 APIs and 45 Microservices with almost 235 APIs on Confluence. Documents included:
- Swagger.
- Request/ Response – JSON/XML.
- Backend calls and database details.
- Diagrammatic representation of API flow.
- API Specification (mandatory, not null, optional etc.).
Case 2: To decommission, the team followed the below approach:
- Connected with several teams and gathered data of consumers and traffic of APIs.
- Created multiple sheets and consolidated the data of inactive consumers and APIs.
- Requested a change to decommission the inactive APIs to reduce the load and cost of server.
Case 3: Since the management was not aware of the technicality of APIs, the team performed the following tasks:
- Created a consolidated diagram of all the services and added details of consumers (Upstream) and Backend calls (Downstream).
- Deep dived into the code and documented validations in an understandable format.
- Tested the APIs to fetch error code details and raised bugs which occurred during the entire process.
Benefits derived
- Reduced the server cost via decommissioning of inactive APIs.
- The management is now able to detect similar issues arising in the APIs.
- During the RBI Audit, the company had the data about all the APIs on a single platform.
To achieve the above functionalities, the team coherently worked with the following internal customer teams:
- Onboarding Team – For consumer details.
- DataPower Team – For API details and traffic.
- Infra Team – For EG and broker details.
- L2 Team – For decommission of change raise.
- ESB Team – For data and ESB code understanding.
- Microservice Team – For understanding and validating the code.
- IT Team – For access to retrieve information.
- PAM Team, Bitbucket Team, Release Team – For data and access.
Competency and Capability
- Requirement gathering.
- Diagrammatic representation of flow.
- Template creation.
- Code understanding.
- Addition of data on Confluence.
- Testing APIs.
Tech Stack Used
- JAVA
- Swagger
- Postman
