The platform's integrations were fronted by a managed gateway priced against a quota. I replaced it with a custom edge built on KrakenD open source: one declarative place for routing and credentials, running on infrastructure the team already operates.
The platform talks to a growing set of third-party systems — property feeds, CRMs, notification services — and each of those integrations arrived with its own routing, its own auth handling, and its own place in the request path. Traffic was fronted by Azure API Management, which is priced against a quota. As integration count grew, so did the bill and the amount of gateway configuration nobody fully owned.
Reading the traffic first made the decision straightforward. Almost none of the managed gateway's premium surface was in use — the real work was routing, aggregating a handful of upstream calls, attaching credentials, and shaping responses. That is exactly the shape KrakenD is built for, and it runs as a container on infrastructure the team already operates.
Endpoints are declared as configuration rather than written as code, so adding an integration means describing the backend, the method, and the fields to pass through. Cloudflare stays in front for edge protection; the gateway itself is a pod in the existing Kubernetes cluster, deployed through the same Azure pipeline as every other service.