Volkswagen Financial Services offers the ability for millions of customers worldwide to purchase, lease, and insure vehicles of all brands within the VW Group. In the last few years, usage of digital applications has exponentially increased. This spike in demand required us to build and evolve a reliable, highly available, and performant API layer that could enable us to offer a best-in-class user experience for financing, leasing, and managing contracts.

In this talk, we will take you through our journey from zero to full visibility into our multiregion distributed API platform hosted in AWS. We will share how we created a data-driven DevOps mindset throughout the organization, how specific API architectures evolved based on continuous performance monitoring, and how we enabled a self-service proactive and reactive detection of problems at scale.

We will look at how Datadog helped us to establish a standardized operational methodology which enabled us to exponentially grow the number of APIs and regions; in one year we scaled from 40 to 130 APIs and from one to six AWS regions, all distributed across more than 100 AWS accounts. Moreover, analyzing ingested platform data helped us make investment decisions based on performance, availability, and popularity of APIs.