CASE STUDY

Kotak Securities Successfully Exposes Trading Platform with 4X Increase in Traffic with WSO2 API Manager

Kotak Securities logo

Product Area

API Management

Region

Asia Pacific

Industry

Financial Services

Highlights

Achieved 4x in concurrent traffic through autoscaling

Created a secure API marketplace for the trading platform

Built an auto-scalable platform with high availability

Overview

Known as India's top broker today, Kotak Securities (KSec) was established in 1994 as a Kotak Mahindra Bank subsidiary. Over 800,000 trades are made daily on their internet trading platform, which has 1.7 million consumer accounts. They serve clients from 393 locations across India through 1,539 branches, franchisees, and satellite offices across their whole national presence. Stock brokerage, portfolio management, and market data analysis are just a few of KSec's offerings.

quotes

We chose WSO2 because of its architectural excellence, the alignment of its features with our needs, the ease of scaling up and down, and its marketplace web interface."

Ashish Naik

Executive Vice President - IT Applications

Kotak Securities

Challenge

The web and mobile applications that makeup KSec's online trading platform run on an API layer that serves as the interface to its trading engine. These APIs allow fintech companies to quickly integrate with KSec systems and give end users the ability to create custom trading strategies. For this platform, the company had three main requirements:

  • Upgrade the API stack to conform to the current OpenAPI 3.0 standard
  • Securely expose the APIs in a user-friendly API marketplace and provide KSec support for WebSocket APIs and comprehensive API lifecycle management
  • Build an auto-scalable platform with high availability deployment support to accommodate high volumes of traffic that are usually generated during peak morning hours

Solution

KSec examined three API management options, and two of them were put to the test. Because WSO2's capabilities matched KSec's requirements, it was simple to scale the solution, and it provided a marketplace web interface, The initial PoC was completed by the internal technical team, and WSO2's support team assisted in deciding on the ideal deployment architecture. Additionally, the company collaborated with WSO2 product experts on production deployment and the server's hardening procedure for maximum security.

KSec used WSO2 API Manager as their API lifecycle management solution for their trading platform. This solution consists of three main components:

  • WSO2 API Manager control plane consists of the API publisher, store, traffic manager, and key manager
  • The API gateway cluster for auto scalability can scale without restriction because of the flexibility of WSO2's commercial model
  • The API analytics component provides statistics, reports, and graphs on APIs deployed in WSO2 API Manager. This also allowed KSec to configure alerts on unusual behavior and error conditions in near real-time. This data is aggregated in user-friendly dashboards that show different views to different user groups such as app developers, API publishers, DevOps engineers, and program managers, who can learn more about the underlying API ecosystem.

Utilizing an Amazon Linux-based virtual machine environment, WSO2's solution is deployed on AWS. The backend database server for WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 API Manager analytics servers is Amazon Aurora.

Results

Using its built-in WebSocket support, WSO2 API Manager successfully met the primary need of securely exposing the API layer of the KSec trading platform. When the market opens each day, they were able to scale out to handle high concurrency (4 times the average traffic or more). For both its web and mobile applications, KSec views the solution's stability and the number of concurrent requests handled during peak traffic as two crucial indicators of the solution's success.

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