Background

The journey began with the acquisition of Nexmo, a business specializing in APIs for communications, which operated on SoftLayer’s bare-metal infrastructure and primarily utilized Java services across various web servers. The challenge was not just about migrating to the cloud—it was also a strategic opportunity to modernize traffic management, improve authentication, and establish service consistency.

Vonage handles over 25 billion minutes and messages terminated yearly, making uptime and service reliability critical. With a 99.999% service uptime guarantee, the company required a solution that offered reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency. After evaluating various gateway providers, Vonage chose Solo’s Gloo Gateway for its flexibility and developer empowerment. This transition also involved migrating from SoftLayer to Amazon Web Services (AWS), ensuring a more scalable and resilient infrastructure to support increasing demand.

The Challenge: Migrating to the Cloud and Establishing Operational Excellence

Before moving to AWS, Vonage relied on a centralized NGINX deployment managed by an SRE team to route traffic. Updating routes, onboarding new services, and making configuration changes required coordination with this team, creating bottlenecks that slowed development. Consequently, developers had limited visibility and control over their traffic flows, making iteration and deployment cumbersome.

The team also faced multiple operational challenges. Authentication was fragmented, with each team managing credentials independently, leading to inconsistencies across services. Rate limiting was not uniformly implemented, resulting in unpredictable performance across different customer experiences. Additionally, the shift to the cloud required a more standardized approach that maintained backward compatibility while allowing services to scale efficiently.

Vonage needed a solution that could empower its technical and development teams, enabling them to build the velocity and agility required to meet growing customer demands.

The Solution: Embracing Agile Development and Operations with Gloo Gateway

Vonage implemented Gloo Gateway to enhance operational efficiency and decentralize traffic management, allowing application teams to take ownership of traffic routing. With Gloo Gateway, teams could define their own routes and manage traffic without relying on a centralized SRE function. Additionally, Gloo Gateway enabled the Vonage team to adopt a GitOps workflow, streamlining the route contribution process and automating high-availability and failover mechanisms—reducing manual oversight and potential errors.

"When we did proof of concepts, we worked with a few different gateway vendors, and far and away, Solo.io’s support during that phase was worlds apart from everybody else. That’s been maintained throughout the last few years of our relationship." Jonathan Lane, Senior Team Manager, Vonage API Platform

Beyond traffic management, Gloo Gateway provided flexibility in handling legacy service behaviors while supporting the modernization of new services. By leveraging transformers within the gateway, Vonage ensured that older services continued responding with expected error codes and responses, while newer services could adopt a more standardized error-handling approach.

Gloo Gateway also improved backward compatibility across services, enabling legacy and modern services to coexist seamlessly. The migration further enhanced operational efficiency by reducing dependency on a centralized team, allowing developers to test, iterate, and deploy changes faster. Teams leveraged Gloo Gateway’s capabilities to conduct a phased migration of services across domains and regions, minimizing downtime risk and enforcing thorough testing to mitigate potential issues.

To address scalability, the team optimized infrastructure by testing different machine types and configurations in AWS. They transitioned to network-optimized instances where necessary and introduced preemptive scaling to handle traffic spikes efficiently, ensuring reliable service delivery for high-volume customers.

The Result: Vonage Builds a More Efficient and Scalable Future

With Gloo Gateway in place, Vonage has achieved greater developer autonomy and operational efficiency. Developers now have the tools to manage their own routing, authentication is centralized, and rate limiting is applied consistently across services. The transition to the cloud has not only improved performance but also provided a foundation for future scalability.

"The most important thing in our choice of Solo.io has been the partnership on support." Jonathan Lane, Senior Team Manager, Vonage API Platform

Looking ahead, Vonage is focused on further streamlining operations, improving rollout efficiency, and refining its approach to high availability and failover management. With Gloo Gateway, the team has built a cloud-native infrastructure that balances flexibility with control, allowing them to continue innovating while ensuring seamless service for their customers.

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