May 2022 Summaries

GraphQL Summit is back and will take place in person at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina from October 3-5, 2022. The conference aims to celebrate the GraphQL community with real developer use cases and teach new things to attendees. Interested developers can submit talk proposals by June 29, with a deadline for acceptance by July 8. Speakers will receive a conference ticket, buddy pass, speaker lounge access, and video recording of their talks. The event promotes an inclusive environment and offers support for first-time speakers. Attendees are required to agree to the Code of Conduct and Terms & Conditions before registration opens.

Apollo Kotlin has adopted the Hierarchical Multi-Platform Project (HMPP) convention in its latest release, 3.3.0, enabling code-sharing among several platforms without custom scripting. This allows users to update their project to use Kotlin 1.6.20+, which is now enabled by default. Apollo Kotlin also introduces a new Memory Manager for native code development, addressing concurrency issues such as `IncorrectDereferenceException` and `InvalidMutabilityException`. The new memory manager is currently alpha but compatible with Apollo Kotlin, allowing users to enable it on their project with the flag `kotlin.native.binary.memoryModel=experimental`. With these updates, Apollo Kotlin continues to evolve in line with Kotlin Multiplatform's advancements, aiming to provide a solid and nice-to-use experience for developers.

The Apollo team has introduced the concept of a "supergraph," a unified composition layer for GraphQL that brings together a company's data, microservices, and digital capabilities. The supergraph is built on three core principles: a unified composition layer, a modular architecture, and an agile approach. This architecture enables teams to implement a more advanced GraphQL strategy, empowering developers to ship schema changes swiftly and safely, causing the schema to naturally evolve based on actual usage and business needs. To support this goal, Apollo has released updates to its Federation 2 and Apollo Router components, which provide a flexible shared ownership model, standardized tooling, and improved performance advantages. Additionally, GraphOS Studio is now available to everyone, offering validation, automation, and observability for building and operating a supergraph.

Apollo Router is now generally available`, a next-generation runtime for the supergraph stack, has been released. It's designed to be faster and more efficient than Apollo Gateway, with performance benchmarks showing 10x speedup and 90% less variance in latency. The router supports Apollo Federation (v1 or v2) and comes with built-in options like CORS controls, header propagation, telemetry, and more that can be configured with a declarative YAML file. It also features a rich extensibility model, allowing developers to add custom functionality through Rust plugins and Rhai scripting. The developer experience is designed to be seamless, with automatic integration of user-written plugins into the main configuration. Apollo Router is now available for use, and users can start by checking out the migration guide or quickstart docs depending on their current supergraph journey.

Vivek Ravishankar from Apollo Studio announced that Schema Checks and Launches are now available for free in the platform, allowing users to build, iterate, and deploy supergraphs with speed and confidence. The delivery pipeline provides automation, validation, and observability to deliver changes rapidly and safely. Schema checks validate subgraph schema composition and operation checks ensure the composed supergraph serves client applications. Launches provide a way to reason about the lifecycle of a supergraph, summarizing updates over time and debugging issues. This update makes Apollo Studio's end-to-end delivery pipeline available to everyone, allowing developers to start building supergraphs with ease.

Contracts, a feature in Apollo Studio's Enterprise plan, allow developers to create tailored graphs for different audiences by applying filters to a single unified graph. This enables organizations to provide varying levels of access and schema scoping for partners, public APIs, and client applications without losing the benefits of the unified graph. Contracts integrate seamlessly with other features of Apollo Studio, including Federation 2, which offers improved shared ownership models, enhanced type merging, and cleaner syntax. The feature includes new functionality such as contract launches, support for Federation 2 and tagging additional schema elements, filter previews, and improved error handling. To get started, developers can check out the documentation and migrate their source variants to Federation 2, with Enterprise trials available for those not on the plan.

Apollo Uplink has introduced multi-cloud support, which allows services to be decoupled from a single cloud provider and instead rely on multiple providers. This feature is part of the Apollo Gateway service, which provides a federated GraphQL schema registry. With multi-cloud support, Apollo Gateways can poll both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services for updates, ensuring that services remain available even if one provider goes down. The upgrade process involves installing the latest version of the `@apollo/gateway` package, and most users will find the default configuration sufficient. This feature aims to increase reliability and stability, providing 99.97% uptime for Apollo Uplink users.