FADEL Reduces API Generation from Days to 30 Minutes on AWS

FADEL needed to generate, document, and expose APIs for its AWS-based Rights Cloud platform to internal and external developers. Using Cedrus’ API Czar tool, FADEL can generate APIs in 30 minutes.  

As individuals shift more toward a digital-first approach and consume information and entertainment digitally, licensing in the media and entertainment industry grows more complex. FADEL’s mission is to abstract away the complexities of licensing for companies through automation. The company has built its Rights Cloud platform to provide companies with a new way to manage licensing from end-to-end.

“Traditionally, we've found a big disconnect in managing the licensing process, agreements, clearance of content, and payment," says Tarek Fadel, founder and chief executive officer at FADEL. "Many processes are manual and lack transparency. Our mission is to use technology and build a platform to not only automate workflows and processes throughout this line of business but also to help companies use data in a new way so that our system can serve as licensing record for the entire organization and can be viewed as an end-to-end rights repository."  

Aiming to grow its global client base, scale quickly, and improve its security posture, FADEL chose to migrate its Rights Management Platform application to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and build a multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) architecture for its Rights Cloud offering.

To ensure the accessibility, flexibility, and easy integration of Rights Cloud with other applications and systems, FADEL needed to expose its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) while also increasing the security implemented at the API level. FADEL began by manually exposing some of its APIs and capabilities and found the process painful and limiting. The company sought to identify a solution that could simplify how it generated, documented, and exposed APIs.

Having worked with Cedrus, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Select Consulting Partner, FADEL felt confident in the company's ability to provide an innovative solution to solve its problem. “The availability of Cedrus’ API Czar tool—a platform that assists developers in the documentation, design, and development of enterprise-grade APIs—proved the main driver for our continued engagement,” says Walid Daccache, senior vice president of technology at FADEL. “API Czar is now the main tool we use to expose our public APIs for Rights Cloud. API Czar is what our developers use to expose an API, provide the needed schema for how the API needs to work, and then maintain, create, and make available the API on AWS.”

API Czar helps FADEL enforce governance and speed up the development of its APIs. The tool uses serverless computing services on AWS by generating API code that is deployed to Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. FADEL and external developers can then use the APIs to interact with Rights Cloud pragmatically. The API Czar user interface (UI) allows FADEL to customize the API to its specific security specifications flexibly. Cedrus worked closely with FADEL to implement and update the tool as needed to meet the company’s needs.  

By using API Czar on AWS, FADEL has reduced the amount of time it takes to generate APIs from 2–3 days down to 30 minutes. By using the same API-creation best practices templates each time, FADEL ensures it is delivering consistent quality for developers. The time API Czar saves FADEL’s developers enables them to focus on other business-impacting projects.

The FADEL team found Cedrus’ willingness to work together and modify its tooling invaluable. "A main benefit for us is how closely our team has been able to work with Cedrus," says Daccache. "We've worked closely together and have provided feedback resulting in significant updates to the API Czar tooling. Cedrus has been very receptive to updating the tool to make sure it did what we needed from an authentication standpoint. We've been impressed with Cedrus' ability to support us as we grow."