Case Study: Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology improves API reliability and self-service access with Tyk

Using Tyk to serve millions of complex route maps to consumers, and enable innovation amongst commercial and academic users

Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) needed a better way to manage the openrouteservice APIs behind its public route and map service. As usage grew, the team faced slow XML-based responses, manual API key requests, downtime from stability issues, and limits on scaling while keeping costs low. HeiGIT chose Tyk’s Open Source API Gateway, API Management Platform and API Developer Portal because it fit the project’s open-source goals and offered the features the team needed.

Tyk was implemented on HeiGIT’s servers in 2 days, giving the team a self-service portal, swagger support, versioning, and custom portal capabilities. The new setup helped HeiGIT support 900,000 API requests per month, 40,000 peak requests per day, 4,000 developer portal users, and 2 gateway nodes, while making it easier to serve more than 1,000 developers using the openrouteservice API.

Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology