Microservices, Tools, and Scale: Stories from GraphQL in Production in 2018
As more have companies adopted GraphQL since it was open sourced by Facebook in 2015, the knowledge sharing in the community continues to grow.
With individuals reflecting on their own company’s stack and considering the benefits that GraphQL may bring, it’s helpful to review case studies that are:
- recent
- production-focused
- detailed
With that in mind, we wanted to share some of our favorite recent resources about GraphQL in production.
GraphQL and Microservices
Moving from a monolith to a microservice architecture with GraphQL @ Brigade
Brigade is a company that helps like-minded people and rally support for a cause.
In a video covering the evolution of GraphQL at Brigade from Apollo Day, Steve Rice covers Brigade’s transition from a single monolith to a microservice driven architecture. The article offers a deep explanation of their usage of Apollo services and traces their path from a single internal API monolith using REST to their current architecture.
Incorporating GraphQL in a Microservice based architecture @ Trulia
Trulia is an online real estate company that helps individuals buy and rent homes.
In her article, GraphQL: One Endpoint to Rule Them All, from September 2018, Francesca Guiducci goes over how Trulia got their engineering team using GraphQL. Using GraphQL allowed their front and backend teams build their products at their own speed independently, but the question of how to integrate it led to a number of decisions. They had to decide on:
- The language with which to work with GraphQL— the result? Typescript
- the codebase structure— in the end Trulia found that having two repositories was most practical: one for the schema and the other for service concerns
- the set up of the internal file structure— their result was a file structure with a resolver, service, and connector.
Seeing the impact of GraphQL within a company helps others understand the types of questions that need to be answered for a successful implementation.
The GraphQL Tooling Ecosystem
The tooling that greases the wheels of GraphQL Development @ Airbnb
Perhaps no case study better illustrates the speed and benefit of GraphQL in a large company than the keynote by Adam Neary from Airbnb at GraphQL summit.
Airbnb was able to develop products at an incredible rate with GraphQL. After giving the keynote, Adam Neary published an accompanying article, How Airbnb is Moving 10X faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo. There he shows off how the active, continually growing GraphQL community has created a rich tooling ecosystem for GraphQL.
Some of the tools highlighted:
- The Apollo CLI
- The Prisma GraphQL Playground
- The Apollo GraphQL VS Code Extension
The underlying infrastructure and tooling for a production GraphQL setup @ Kiwi.com
Kiwi.com is an online travel agency focused on helping people find travel tickets within their budget and is one of the top ticket sellers in Europe.
In his talk, How we started with GraphQL on top of our REST API , at Shift Conf, Michael Sanger highlights just one of the reasons for the move to GraphQL. He shows a REST response that continues off the screen, and off of the next screen, and only finishes at the end of the third screen. Under-documented, over-fetching, and having issues with versioning, REST at kiwi.com was replaced by GraphQL. There, a number of tools to help it run effectively:
- Appsync — to simplify the infrastructure set up
- GraphiQL
- GraphQL Voyager
Benefits and Challenges of GraphQL at Scale
Designing a GraphQL API @ Trulia
Twenty three lessons from three years of running GraphQL in production at Shopify provide the foundation for a detailed tutorial on Designing a GraphQL API.
While any team’s GraphQL use case has its own nuances, the tutorial summarises the major GraphQL API implementation considerations.
The nitty gritty of GraphQL in production @ Netflix
A detailed article diving into the adoption of GraphQL by the technical marketing technology wing of Netflix, Our learnings from adopting GraphQL by Artem Shtatnov and Ravi Srinivas Ranganathan does a number of interesting things:
- explains the technical issues that GraphQL was put in place to address
- shares the solution their team found
- dives into the challenges caused by GraphQL
- explains how they addressed those issues as well
For other companies, reading a realistic summary of what it takes to get started with GraphQL can help them plan for their own potential GraphQL issues and begin to think about possible solutions.
Can’t get enough of GraphQL? Join us at GraphQL Conf, June 20th & 21st in Berlin. Early Bird tickets are still available until March 20th, and the GraphQL Conf Call for Papers is open! 💫
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