‘Intrapreneurial’ insurance fueled by Apigee & Redocly
Here’s how viesure and twinformatics, the innovation & IT powerhouses inside
WIENER STÄDTISCHE Versicherung AG, build and maintain airtight developer
experiences using our most popular enterprise integrations.
Startup wonders aren’t only born in student dorms, garages and incubators. Sometimes they’re built by ‘intrapreneurs’ who push hard-tech innovation inside larger companies.
Such is the case of viesure, the Innovation Center of WIENER STÄDTISCHE Versicherung AG and twinformatics, the company operating the Wiener Städtische Developer Portal. We’ve talked to product advocate Petra Herbst about our story together, whose origins she deftly summarized like so:
- Petra
To learn what happened next, all you need to do is read on.
Product Advocate & Technical Writer
OAS, Git, Apigee... An API builder’s busy shopping list
- Petra
Being on a mission to drive innovation inside WIENER STÄDTISCHE Versicherung AG (#nopressure there), viesure needed all the API streamlining they could get. Especially since this was their first crack at building and documenting APIs using the OpenAPI spec.
Fortunately, no journey is wasted if you know the destination, and Petra and the API team had a pretty clear idea of what they were looking for.In short? They needed API docs that were:
- Reliable, but packed with features
- Easy to use, but highly customizable
- Fully integrated with their specific workflow
Let’s fly through their shopping list (which, well yes, we checked the heck out of).
Tryout capability
API docs are of little use if developers can’t test real-life requests. A functional try-it console was a must.
Full OpenAPI support
This was viesure’s first crack at building with the OAS spec, so they needed full support right off the bat.
Beyond API reference
Adding as many custom developer onboarding flows as they wanted beside the API reference documentation.
No CMS, no stress!
Life’s too short to learn new CMS tools. Petra & co. needed a docs-like-code approach fully integrated with their GitLab pipeline.
Apigee integration
Having settled on Google’s API management, viesure and twinformatics needed an airtight connection between Apigee and their public docs.
Apigee: the Google-sized elephant in the room
Apigee is one of the industry’s favorite API management solutions. Thousands of companies use it to design, secure, and scale their APIs under the mother-hen wing of Google Cloud.
Apigee was viesure’s provider of choice, so any docs and portals had to integrate seamlessly and build on top of it. While Apigee’s native solutions didn’t cut the bill, the team had already found Redocly, and was glad to discover we integrated in full with Apigee.
Safety & control via Apigee proxy
Redocly’s Apigee integration connects directly to our Developer Portal, so you can build a custom developer onboarding experience while keeping your APIs secure and accessible on Google’s popular platform.
It works via a secure proxy that communicates with Apigee’s backend, making it possible for developers to test and consume APIs from a browser under the same logic you’ve set in Apigee.
- Petra
This workflow combines seamlessly with every aspect of Redocly Portals: any portal you build will always auto-update from Apigee and your own source control.
- Petra
How the Apigee proxy works. To learn how to set it up, read this
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Portals + docs-like-code = <3
Updating the API in the registry automatically updates the portal content- Docs-like-code with GitLab pipeline integration
- Previews on each pull request make testing and debugging a breeze
- Easy to customize developer portal starter template
- Rich visual customization options for portal UI
- Adding multiple pages and custom flows beside reference docs
Beyond the easy setup and API management integration, viesure and twinformatics have a no less exciting day-to-day building and documenting their APIs.
With our Developer Portal they can personalize their user flows with custom pages, sections, interactions and visuals that transcend API reference docs. And keeping docs up to date is easy with GitLab connected directly to their docs pipeline, ready to preview and update with every pull and merge:
- Petra
With this tight connection set up, viesure’s portal and collaboration provides a single point of access for both their partners and internal product owners.
The viesure + twinformatics implementation in short
Documentation breeds innovation
And the other way around!
We find intrapreneurial stories incredibly inspiring, and love hearing them firsthand from innovators we help deliver APIs into the world. In fact, Redocly itself was born as an ‘intrapreneurial’ project inside Rebilly, a fintech trying to make their OAS definitions easier to consume as docs (Redocly = Rebilly Documentation).
We wish the awesome teams at viesure and twinformatics the best of luck with their API journey. And while Petra praised our support team far and wide…
- Petra
… we know we can do more (looking at you, Apigee Teams integration), and will continue to do so day and and day out. Because when you don’t have to think about documentation being up to speed, you can give innovation the bandwidth it needs to accelerate.