REST assured, Apollo’s Data Graph Platform is the modern GraphQL standard
by Micah Smurthwaite, Richard Lui, T.J. Rylander
Regardless of whether you’re a frontend, backend or full stack developer today, you’ve likely had experience with or heard of the API architecture, GraphQL Open sourced by Facebook in 2015, GraphQL equips developers with the ability to declaratively query information from backend data sources. At Next47, we’re excited to be supporting the team at Apollo, who have pioneered the industry-standard for GraphQL implementation: the Data Graph.
During the early days of adoption, frontend developers were the initial champions of this API approach, recognizing the simplicity that GraphQL provided through consolidating multiple REST API requests into one complete query. Each API request traditionally retrieved the full data payload of that request and the overfetching caused a performance hit on applications. GraphQL had the potential to lower this latency as the query would only retrieve the precise information the client needed from the data source.
Enter Apollo Client and Server. Open sourced in early 2016, Apollo Client quickly became one of the most popular GraphQL clients for frontend teams to orchestrate how their web and native applications retrieved data. It was designed with support for modern frameworks (e.g. built-in integration with React) and provided out-of-the-box caching to avoid refetching resources, further boosting application performance. Apollo Server was open sourced concurrently, allowing backend teams to write and maintain the data schema and resolvers that enable the data retrieval at the GraphQL client level. Frontend teams waved goodbye to the tedious days when they had to rely on a long list of custom API endpoints to build applications.
As enthusiasm around GraphQL continued to grow over time, it became clear that GraphQL was not only a frontend query language syntax but an elegant system that unifies data access. Developers and customers began searching for answers on how best to manage a system like this at scale.
In response, the team then built Apollo Studio and Federation to provide a full control plane over their open source offerings, equipping customers with enterprise-grade tooling to manage, what Apollo has since termed, the Data Graph. The Data Graph is an abstraction layer to the services, databases and APIs in a customers’ infrastructure. It is a map of all the interrelationships, with which developers can utilize to power their products. For enterprise-scale deployments, Apollo Federation virtualizes the schemas of multiple sub data graphs into one single graph so developers can readily access data regardless of where it lives. Apollo Studio features like schema registry, which tracks changes to customers’ GraphQL schemas across their data sources, and metrics reporting, which helps customers understand how their data graph is being utilized, have all become key components of modern GraphQL implementation.
After speaking with GraphQL customers, partners, and users, one recurring theme consistently rang through: developers love Apollo. An engineering leader at a Fortune 500 company shared with us: “After we standardized on Apollo, both frontend and backend teams increased their productivity by 3x.” Developers who build great products want to ship what they’ve built efficiently, and cumbersome data infrastructure systems delay the process. Apollo’s Data Graph platform overlays (and therefore, does not interrupt) the existing services architected by the backend team while granting frontend teams an interface to “FastPass” access these existing services through structured queries.
This is why we are thrilled to announce that Next47 is participating in Apollo’s $130M financing round as they continue to push the boundaries of GraphQL. Geoff, Matt, and the team at Apollo GraphQL have an incredible track record of executing on their vision around this crucial data infrastructure technology, and we can’t wait to see where the rest of the journey takes them.
