Bringing High Speed to the Next Level with Internal APIs

CASE STUDY
Bringing High Speed
to the Next Level
with Internal APIs
CASE STUDY
Bringing High Speed
to the Next Level
with Internal APIs
Company Size
Enterprise
Industry
Media + Entertainment /
Telecommunications
API Program TYPE
Private (Internal + Partner)
Goals of API Program
Replace legacy systems with a centralized
database of RESTful APIs
Reduce technical debt with
traffic management
Eliminate partner onboarding pains
Facilitate data sharing among departments
Results
Efficiently runs traffic both through the
cloud and on-premise via Mashery API
Management
Partner onboarding went from weeks
to hours
OAuth 2.0 Accelerator ensures secure
data exchanges
Internal data sharing went from hours
or days to less than 30 minutes
A leader in the media and entertainment space,
Comcast has replaced legacy systems with an efficient
and comprehensive internal API program that spans
departments within the company. With more than 80
APIs and counting, Comcast has cut its onboarding
time for third-party partners and improved data
sharing among internal developers, resulting in
innovative apps that satisfy customers on any device.
Leading Innovation in Media
and Entertainment
Comcast is one of the world’s leading media,
entertainment, and communications companies
serving more than 50 million customers across the
United States. In order to create the world’s best
entertainment and online experiences, part of the
Comcast vision is to drive innovation. However, as an
enterprise with more than 125,000 employees around
the country, it became difficult to streamline the
technological processes that keep Comcast on the
cutting edge of consumer media products.
Developers in the company were increasingly pulling
resources from different parts of the enterprise to
improve the customer experience. Relying on disparate
legacy systems, this process became lengthy and
inefficient. “Comcast has been in the high speed
business for years, and we needed our internal
operations to reflect that,” says Hai Thai, Senior
Engineer at Comcast.
Historically, Comcast had employed VPNs to create
new services and to onboard partners. “Integrating
with third-party vendors used to be very painful,”
says Thai. “We would have to build new data centers
internally, plus create VPNs and private networks from
scratch just for one integration. Plus, VPNs were not
reusable.” As Thai says, it could take more than four
weeks to complete one integration.
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CASE STUDY
The infrastructure also lacked a centralized database to
track VPNs and datacenters created among the different
departments at Comcast, resulting in double the work
and low efficiency. “We’re in a highly competitive
marketplace where everything happens fast,” says Thai.
“We decided to turn to RESTful APIs to transition to a
much quicker, more efficient model.”
Satisfying Enterprise and
Consumer Needs with APIs
Comcast created CodeBig, its internal API platform, and
began developing APIs to replace some of its legacy
channels. Yet, the team knew that if it did not implement
API management, the company could easily fall into
the same pitfalls it had with VPNs. “We’re a very big
company with hundreds of thousands of people working
on a multitude of different projects,” says Thai. “We
knew API management could help us centralize all of our
APIs and reduce a lot of the technical debt and doublework we’d been experiencing.”
Adopting a centralized platform would also aid in
fostering a strong internal developer community and
avoiding overlap in work. Lastly, Comcast needed a
secure solution to quickly onboard third-party partners.
An API Program with
Scalability Baked In
One of CodeBig’s requirements was a truly distributed
API management solution, meaning traffic running
simultaneously through Mashery’s enterprise-grade
cloud infrastructure and on-premise via Mashery Local.
“We knew we needed a hybrid solution so we could
have the best of both worlds: the flexibility of the cloud,
coupled with the security and improved performance
of on-premise,” says Thai. With Mashery, Comcast
controls and monitors its API traffic from one central
dashboard, and can quickly and easily shift APIs from
one deployment infrastructure to the other.
With its traffic controlled, Comcast can focus on
optimizing its APIs to increase efficiency among
developers. “APIs allow Comcast to offer new and better
services to our customers fast,” adds Thai, “it’s all about
saving time.”
Comcast began developing enterprise APIs to streamline
data sharing among divisions that became increasingly
necessary to create the apps that consumers demand.
For instance, a customer-facing app might pull data
about a subscriber’s usage information plus program
listings to produce information tailored to each user.
Each API reduces the amount of time it takes for
developers to access this data and code and is also a
reusable resource. What used to take several hours or
days, developers at Comcast can now do in less than 30
minutes. Aiding this efficiency is Comcast’s centralized
portal that houses all of its APIs. The portal is a onestop shop for APIs from every department within the
company, and each group issues and manages its own
keys. Comcast’s APIs have been so successful among
its developers, partly because they have such easy
access to them via the portal, that CodeBig has grown
tremendously from the dozen APIs with which it began.
“With more than 80 APIs, Mashery allows us to manage
our program with fewer resources, which allows us to
scale much quicker,” says Thai. “And the centralized
portal ensures we don’t have 80 more of the same.” The
portal has facilitated the development of an arsenal of
apps, including Xfinity Connect, which gives Comcast
customers access to their Comcast email, voicemail, and
text messages, and Xfinity TV Sports Remote, which
allows users to record games and get live scores from
any device.
Comcast also uses its APIs to integrate with third-party
partners to produce new and innovative consumer
experiences in a secure way. Comcast uses the Mashery
OAuth 2.0 Accelerator to ensure secure data exchanges
between partners and with its customers. And with APIs,
the appropriate data can be shared instantly. “Comcast
went from about four weeks’ lead time to just a few hours
to onboard partners,” says Thai.
“With more than 80 APIs, Mashery allows us
to manage our program with fewer resources,
which allows us to scale much quicker.”
–Hai Thai
Senior Engineer
This speed allows the company to create more
partnerships faster, thus satisfying customers’ needs
for new features quickly and cost-effectively. One of
Comcast’s latest third-party integrations is Xfinity text
messaging (XTM). With XTM, anyone who has a landline
running through Comcast can get free text messaging.
What typically would have required building an operating
center plus a VPN to onboard the SMS provider now only
needs an API, boiling down the workload to just a couple
of hours.
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CASE STUDY
The Future Is Open
As more and more APIs are developed internally,
CodeBig claims a growing presence within the Comcast
enterprise. Thai says, “With CodeBig, we have a chance
to drive the standards of the company’s potential.”
In the future, Thai sees more creative partner
integrations so Comcast can continue to provide the
best user experiences possible, plus the chance of
opening some of its data by externalizing a few APIs.
“The possibilities are endless with CodeBig,” says Thai.
“Whenever we’re ready, we can open data with our
platform in the future.”
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09/22/15
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