Federated API Management with Gravitee’s Rory Blundell

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Alan Shimo back here on Textron tv.

Thanks for joining us today. My next guest is the first timer here on Textron tv. He's the CEO of a company called Graphite, and his name is Rory Blundell.

Hey, Rory, welcome to Text Drug tv. Hello, Alan. Lovely to see you, and thank you for having me.

It's our pleasure to have you on here. Um, I love that background there with that. I don't know if it's a mirror to a window or a window.

It's a painting. It's a painting. Looks Like pictures out.

An exhibition almost, but something like that of that, Ask my wife, she'll give you a different story. Okay. Um, so Rory, let, let's jump into, well, let's jump into a little bit about Rory, if it's okay.

You're the CEO of gravity. Tell us kind of maybe a little bit of your journey. Yeah, sure.

Um, so my journey, I've been the CEO here now for about four years, approximately three and a half, four years. Um, basically it's, it's quite a sort of interesting story actually, the background to how I got involved with Gravity and ultimately became the CEO. So, you know, if you go way back, I've started a few different startups myself, put my house on the market, slept on my mom's sofa, all that sort of stuff.

You know, the entrepreneur, We've been there. Yep. And, um, ultimately I was working for, uh, so one of the companies that I started, we, we sold it a few years back and, um, one of my CTO at the time said, Hey, come and, uh, come and help me with another company that's a startup based, uh, based on the West Coast.

And so I did, I came over and I started running their, um, their field technical operations, so things like, um, engineering in the field and all this sort of stuff and, and working with tech communities. And we were struggling from an API management perspective at the time. We, we weren't, uh, we tried to build a couple of partnerships with some of the older vendors in the market, and I was frustrated that we weren't making more progress, actually, than we could have been at that time.

And so I guess having sort of come from a slightly more entrepreneurial background, I decided to go and, uh, one Saturday afternoon, try and build my own API gateway. Um, and I went on to GitHub and I thought, right, I'm gonna go and find a, um, a, an appliance that I can basically extend. Um, I had some coding capability, so I decided to do that.

And I just discovered Gravity. I discovered Gravity, and it was a small company at the time. And I sent an email to them, uh, or I think, um, I think I actually raised a GitHub issue in actual fact.

And, um, they, they got in contact with me and I said, Hey, I'd really like to come and meet you. And they're based in li in northern France. And so I took a, I was living in London at the time, and I took a train and I went to meet them and I ended up building the partnership for the previous company that I was working.

So I was originally a customer really, of Gravity. Yeah. What a great story.

Four years later, after, well, that was about six years ago in actual fact, and then four years. So I, I kept nagging them and annoying them that I said, Hey, we should, I know what's gonna happen in this market. We should do something.

We should go and build something that's bigger. We should go and build a new thing. And then finally after two years, they obviously seconded and, uh, they, uh, Warmed down Exactly.

They allowed me to join the company. And, um, I guess I then entered the company through Series A, series B, and, uh, we are, where we are now, we're really kicking on global organization nearly. It's about 200 customers worldwide growing about three times in the US at the three times year on year at the moment.

Absolutely massive growth. And we got some really, really exciting things we're releasing from a product perspective as well. I love it.

What a great story. What a classic. Classic, I mean, so I'm a bit of an entrepreneur myself.

I probably started four or five venture backed companies, but from where I sit, I get to speak to entrepreneurs all day long. And, you know, this is a, a kind of common pattern, right? I had a problem.

I can't be the only one with that problem. Yeah. Right?

And so if I could solve my problem, I'll solve other people's problem as well. And then of course, you know, the customer to c well, not always CEO, but a lot of times it'll be customer to CPO or something like that, right? Because you, you were on that side of the fence.

You saw what the market perception was, and now you, you can bring it in here. What a great story. Um, before we jump in further, I, I just wanna gravity spelled a little bit differently than Gravity.

Yeah. io Io. com.

Well, and then now, now of course there's the DO AI guys, right? Oh yeah. You got IO and AI very multi, you know, and who knew that all of these little domain, you know, top level domains making a fortune of money for some of these countries that really didn't have any websites.

Um, tv, another one anyway, um, so Gravity plays in the API gateway, API management space, but you guys recently launched something we're calling Federated API management. And, and obviously, you know, I think most of our audience is familiar with like federated identities for instance, right? Sure.

And, um, why don't you explain, maybe for those who aren't, but what we mean by a federated API management. I tell you what, why, why don't I take a, a slight step back from that and build up from Sure. I guess probably a lot of your audience will be familiar with the concept of API gateways, maybe an API management.

But let me build up over the, over the last 20, 25 years very quickly how we arrived at what, what to address this pain of federated API management. So if you, if you go way back, um, and you start, you know, go back into the nineties even, or the early two thousands, the challenge that people were facing or companies was facing at the time was that they had these huge monolithic PLA applications basically on premise. And they were saying, and the cloud was just starting to come in.

And, and obviously they were like, oh, well this thing looks great. You know, we don't have to host all of this big heavy duty stuff. We can, we can, uh, benefit from economies of scale and not having to have our own data center and blah, blah, blah, all this sort of stuff.

And that's great, but how do you get there? How do you fundamentally go and actually utilize those services when you've got these massive on-premise systems and things of that nature? And the first generation of API management created this layer that sat this thin layer, if you will, that sat on top of all of these different applications so you could break it up and actually make and leverage the cloud a little bit more easily.

And that was what they did. That was a simplistic way of characterizing the challenge that people faced in the early two thousands, into the mid two thousands. Now, as people broke it up, you created a hybrid architecture.

So you had bits of stuff on premise, bits of stuff in the cloud. You have bits of stuff sitting all over the place, basically now that architecture started to create a drive towards what we now think of as a microservices architecture. So you've got all these microservices sitting everywhere, and that started to create the drive and demand for more data, more accurate and more real time.

So people were starting to use things like Kafka, MQTT, if they were doing IOT things alongside their traditional rest API. So suddenly you've got this explosion of complexity happening in the, the mid 2000, like 2010 to to 20, where suddenly it's not just about rest APIs or in the old world soap web services, but you've now got a paradigm shift where you've got this real time data sitting alongside your, let's call it your old school or your, your traditional rest APIs. How do you provide consistent management of all of those in a single paneer glass?

And that really was what Gravity did over the last couple of years. We provided that foundation point. Now, what we started to notice was that when you are dealing with things like Kafka, for example, when you are dealing with rest APIs, it's very commonplace that people may have an existing, like if you are dealing with a massive organization, right?

It's unlikely that you are gonna go in there and they'll be like, oh, never really come across APIs before or never had an API gateway. It's fairly normal that you will find that they will have an API gateway existing somewhere else in the organization, or maybe they're using a Kafka server, for example, whatever it may be. Now, the challenge that they, they face is they don't always necessarily want to move everything away in lift and shift in one go like that.

What they sometimes want to be able to do is do it either in a graduated way or do it on a project by project basis, or use the tool that's most appropriate for that specific project. And, but they still want that ability to have one single pane of glass. And that is the next evolution on from that single unified platform of being able to do sync and async.

So real time and synchronous request response stuff. And so Federated, API management really is about saying, Hey, if you've got some, if you've got all of this stuff, but you might have an A-W-S-A-P-I gateway, maybe you have an Amazon, uh, sorry, an Amazon, uh, API gateway or a, an Apogee Gateway or whatever it may be, and you might have a Confluence server. How do you provide one single pane of glass on top of all of those that very disparate and complex landscape?

And that is what we feel is the next evolution on top of the, on top of what we call event native API management. This is the next evolution on top of it, what we call mul. A simpler way to talk about Federated a p management actually is just to call it multi broker and multi gateway.

So you can have any broker, any gateway, you can have your gravity gateway as well, which can do all of the event native stuff that we've been, we've really been at the forefront of that agenda for the last few years. And now you can bring in any other gateway that you want into your Gravity application that is super powerful, mark powerful from our perspective, and provide that single pane of glass on top of very complex. You think about organization, massive organizations around the world who do this sort of stuff.

And they have hundreds of thousands of APIs that they're having to manage in this very complex ecosystem. Very difficult for them to do that and to get a single pane of glass. So that, that is really from a gravity perspective, where we are doing that at what we are doing right now at this particular point in time.

I love it. So this, I just wanna make sure people, this is available right now. Yep.

People can go on and and check it out. Um, Rory, I'm gonna imagine most of our listeners organizations out here already doing something. Well, maybe I'm wrong.

Do you think most organizations are already doing something around API management? I mean, it's, it's a majority of the traffic on the internet today is APIs or API related traffic. Yeah.

You think most companies already have, you know, not anything is sophisticated, maybe as federated API management, right? But some rudimentary ap, how can you exist without it today? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

I mean, I would personally, um, I believe that most organizations in one way shape or in some way, shape or form are doing something in the universe of API management. They, it may be that they're very, very early in their life cycle, let's say, with APIs. And they feel actually that just having, uh, an in-house built appliance that they've, you know, maybe they've got a couple of developers themselves that can do something.

That's not uncommon that you can find people that do that. But generally speaking, people are, yes, doing things in the sphere, let's say, of API management this particular point in time. It's, it's very, very rare that we come across people and we speak to people that are like, never heard of API management, no idea what this thing is.

Mm-Hmm, agreed. Now this almost kinda led itself though, to working with other API management protocols, product services, et cetera. What are you doing in that regard?

So one of the really cool things from pro, so just touching on the first point that you just said there, protocols, for example, so obviously I mentioned about Kafka and about NQTT and about rest and about, so, so these are, these are different mechanisms. Like you can now physically plug these into the gateway, the gravity gateway, and you can provide one consistent way to build, to manage, to monitor, to secure, to expose, and to consume. Now, what we've done in taking that next step forward, which to me is awesome, is you can now, we've now built connective capability to the A-W-S-A-P-I, gateway to Solace event broker to, for example, Apogee API Gateway, for example.

So now if, let's say, for example, if a customer, if a company that is wanting to go and try and provide consistent security on top of their Kafka topics, for example, so the ability to be able to provide exactly what you would've done in the old school world of API management, where you've got security, you can discover things, you can put traffic shaping all these sorts of stuff that you would've expected in the old world of API management. Now imagine that you want to do that in the world of event management. It doesn't really exist at this point in time.

So gravity, let's say you with gravity, you can do that. That's what we built over the last couple of years. Now imagine for a sec for a second that you've now got that capability and you say, hang on a sec though, I wanna have one single pane of glass with my a, my traditional APIs that are sitting over there on my A-W-S-A-P-I gateway.

You can now plug those in through Gravity as well and provide one massive pane of glass, essentially on top of all of it. And that is very, very differentiated from our perspective to provide that consistent security governance control, discoverability subscription management, so a person can come along. Doesn't matter whether it's REST API soap web service, whether it's a a Kafka topic, they can get all of this sort of stuff in one single place, and you have one single way to be able to manage it.

Love it. Love it. io.

Rory, how does someone get started? Obviously go to the website, but is, is there like a trial program, a free product, a yeah. Thing, you know, how do, what's the on-ramp?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So there's, we have a free trial, um, that people can ob obviously utilize. Um, you can obviously we're very friendly, can always come and speak to us.

You are always welcome to email me personally. com. So feel free to email me if you really, if, uh, if I can help.

I work pretty much 24 7, so, um, anyone you want to email me, you'll probably get an email back within five to 10 minutes. Um, I, I hear you. Um, so the, there's in a, on a series though that we have free trial.

Um, we obviously have, you can get a demo at any time. Um, our team are very, very ready to be able to give demos and show people exactly how to utilize it. We're often at many trade shows and things of that as well.

So you can always come and speak with us at those and, and look at the, the, uh, the kit from that perspective as well. So there's loads of different ways you can get engaged and to speak with us. Uh, and of course you are always welcome to email me as well.

I love it. Hey, Rory, I want to thank you for coming on here, being our guest. Of course, 15 minutes goes incredibly quickly, but I think you did an excellent job of explaining kind of not just what Gravity does, but the whole topic of API management, right?

And I think, again, this is one of those things I said before, right? The majority of all the traffic on the Internet's API related people take for granted, if you will, that it's what's going on out there, but, um, it, you shine the light on it here and people, you know, I think appreciate that. And it'll be interesting to see how this really, I mean, this could say gravity is the standard, if you will.

Yeah. Right, absolutely. And, and that's a great thing.

Best of luck. Come back and join us again. Keep us posted and, and, uh, good luck with Gravity.

Thank you, Alan. It was a pleasure. Really good to speak.

I hope it was our pleasure. Rory Blood do CEO at Gravity Federated, API management. You've got his email questions.

Ask him. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a minute here on Textron Gang.