March 2023 Summaries

Apollo Explorer, a super-charged version of GraphiQL, is not open source because it requires significant resources to maintain and evolve. The creators of Apollo Client and Server have learned from past experiences with open-sourcing other projects, realizing that maintaining popularity comes with increased responsibility and work. To address this, they employ multiple teams of engineers to work on their core open-source projects full-time, making a commitment to the health and betterment of these projects without direct revenue gain. Instead, Apollo Explorer is made available through a CDN, allowing users to embed it in their websites or developer portals with customization options, while maintaining quality updates and rollouts.

In the context of modern financial services apps, customers demand faster and more personalized experiences that require organizations to reconsider their data and technology leverage. To address this, companies can use a GraphOS-powered supergraph to aggregate customer data from multiple sources, providing a unified interface for client applications. This approach allows developers to retrieve only necessary data with GraphQL's flexible querying capabilities, reducing requests and improving performance. Smart resolvers in GraphQL servers can also provide personalized results by retrieving data from various sources based on field relationships and context objects. By adopting this technology, financial services organizations can power their modern apps with a scalable, secure, and efficient solution.

A customer's identity and associated risk factors are crucial for financial institutions to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes. A single customer view (SCV) provides a complete picture of a customer's data, but integrating data from multiple sources can be complex. GraphQL and Apollo GraphOS can help create a unified data experience by aggregating data from disparate internal systems and third-party services. By assigning a risk rating to customers using a federated graph, financial institutions can create a holistic view of their customers' data, including personal and financial information, transaction history, and behavior patterns. This enables businesses to comply with KYC and AML regulations while simplifying the execution of AML procedures by retrieving necessary customer metadata in a single query.

To power modern financial services apps with Apollo GraphOS, developers can leverage the concept of a supergraph to increase development velocity and provide a singular API for frontend and backend teams. A financial services supergraph allows for a one-stop shop for frontend developers to access relevant data and build new features rapidly. By using Apollo GraphOS, backend teams can independently manage portions of a schema while maintaining safety and security. This approach enables the delivery of personalized customer experiences, securing APIs declaratively, adopting a Customer 360 approach to prevent fraud, ensuring compliant and secure third-party access, and more. By exploring a financial services supergraph schema and running real queries, developers can see the possibilities of this architecture firsthand.

Apollo has released updates including a new livestream about implementing a TypeScript subgraph using Apollo Server, an updated Odyssey Lift-off course featuring Apollo Server 4, and a GraphQL Summit supercut discussing authorization in GraphQL. The company also recently released Router version 1.13.0 with improved logging and DataDog compatibility, as well as an apollo-ios beta release for testing multipart subscriptions. Additionally, the community has shared blog posts about using Mercurius in a supergraph and why `@defer` is exciting, as well as reporting bugs in the new `@interfaceObject` implementation to Apollo's Discord server.

Apollo Router 1.12 introduces new features such as coprocessing, distributed caching, and JWT authentication for GraphOS Enterprise, allowing developers to extend the router with any programming language via "coprocessors". GraphQL Summit 2023 is now just one week away, offering an opportunity for developers to submit their proposals and share their knowledge with the community. The latest version of Apollo Kotlin includes bug fixes and hints at version 4.0, while the Apollo Federation spec has a new changelog that makes it easier to find out about new features. There have been recent releases in the apollo-federation-ruby project, adding support for more federation features, including @tag, @inaccessible, and @interfaceObject. Additionally, a video introducing entity interfaces has been released by Lenny Burdette, and there are ongoing efforts to include cool blog posts, videos, or open-source projects related to GraphQL in the community spotlight.

GraphQL has gained popularity as a powerful alternative to REST APIs for building modern web applications, especially in providing compliant and secure third-party access to data. Financial services companies must comply with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA while protecting sensitive customer information from unauthorized access. GraphOS provides out-of-the-box features to protect against unintended data leaks and enables fine-grained control over data exposure through schema contracts, which allows developers to specify exactly which fields and types within a schema that applications are allowed to access. Apollo Studio further enhances security with built-in enterprise authentication features, enforcing user roles, restricting access to protected variants, and limiting the visibility of graphs within the organization. GraphOS Enterprise provides multiple security layers to protect sensitive data while enabling financial companies to enable third-party access to customer data in a compliant manner.

The latest version of Apollo Router, v1.12, has been released with several new features that improve security, performance, and extensibility. The router now includes support for JWT authentication, which allows for defense-in-depth security by rejecting malicious traffic at the edge of the graph. This feature also reduces operational burden on backend API teams, latency due to JWT processing, and speeds up response times. Additionally, the router features distributed APQ caching with Redis, which can significantly reduce p99 latency during peak traffic. The router also supports external coprocessors written in the programming language of choice, providing full isolation and a clean separation of concerns. These features are now available to GraphOS Enterprise customers running self-hosted routers, and the team is excited to make more security and performance features coming up soon for GraphOS Enterprise as well as GraphOS Cloud.

The experimental library for Next.js makes it easier to use Apollo Client with the App directory in Next.js 13. The main feature is the introduction of React Server Components, which allows data fetching on the server, removing the need for client-side fetches in most cases. The library provides a way to get an instance of Apollo Client every time it's needed and makes sure that only one instance is created per request. It also handles caching for Next.js and provides a `useSuspenseQuery` hook for streaming SSR rendering. With this library, you can use Apollo Client in both Server Components and Client Components, making it easier to manage data fetching and caching in your Next.js application.

Apollo has made several updates in March 2023, including improvements to GraphOS organizations and management, avoiding common GraphQL pitfalls such as "microservice madness" and "schema anarchy", the introduction of dynamic templates in Rover, and a rapid roundup of recent releases and recognitions. Additionally, Apollo Server 4.5.0 has been released with several improvements to its landing page, while Apollo Subgraph Compatibility Tests 1.2.1 enables testing for more server implementations. The community spotlight highlights a blog series on Federation by Volvo Car Mobility and a video tutorial on using Apollo Kotlin for Android app development.

Building a GraphQL API in Typescript with Apollo Server` will be covered during a live stream event on 3/22 at 9:00 AM PST, where attendees can get a step-by-step guide to building their subgraph using Schema Definition Language (SDL), including toolings like codegen and GraphOS. The live Q&A session will help answer questions, making this an ideal opportunity for those looking to learn more about Apollo Server + Typescript. The event will be hosted in the Apollo Discord with a live YouTube broadcast, allowing viewers to subscribe for notifications. A video recording of the event will be updated on this post once available.

A declarative approach using GraphQL directives can be used to secure APIs in the financial services industry by enforcing authentication and authorization for specific fields or types in the schema. This approach allows developers to centralize security logic, making it easier to manage and maintain across the entire API surface area. With a directive-based authN/Z solution, teams can implement standard policies, share metadata with other teams, and empower client developers to understand API access requirements. By using Apollo GraphOS, developers can power essential features of modern financial applications while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.

Apollo GraphQL is a technology that enables supergraphs, which are rare and impactful technologies that speed up developer teams and organizations' ability to introduce new products and services. Being featured as Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in Enterprise of 2023 is an honor for Apollo, acknowledging the company's rapid progress and its customers' trust. The goal of Apollo is to bring supergraph technology to more people worldwide, with a focus on empowering developers to build better apps in less time.

The Apollo CLI service commands are now officially deprecated and will reach their final end of life on April 28th, 2023. The Rover CLI is being promoted as an alternative for managing and maintaining graphs through GraphOS, with over 10 million all-time downloads and over 4 million command invocations per day. Despite the deprecation, Apollo will continue to provide support for its client commands, while users are encouraged to migrate to the Rover CLI by referring to a migration guide. The end-of-life schedule is part of Apollo's software lifecycle policies, which can be found in the launch stages documentation.

The upcoming Tech Talk + Workshop on Virtual Events will provide valuable insights and hands-on training on GraphQL schema design best practices. Attendees can expect to learn from experienced developers about common best practices, tips for creating efficient type definitions, and how to build strong schemas that serve as the foundation of successful GraphQL projects. The event is designed for both beginners and experienced developers, offering a unique opportunity to deepen understanding or gain practical skills in GraphQL schema design.

The GraphOS team has introduced operation scripts as a new feature in GraphOS Explorer, allowing users to automate testing workflows by running scripts before their operations. Operation scripts can be used to easily debug individual operations with various values, design and write scripted workflows for testing, and run other saved operations from any variant of the graph. The scripts can also be chained together using the `runOperation` command, which allows users to pass values from one operation to another as GraphQL variables. With this new feature, users can build automated testing workflows without having to go back and forth between tabs, making it easier to test and debug their operations.

GraphOS Cloud is a cloud-hosted platform that offers instant-on access to blazing-fast graph routing for any GraphQL API, integrated tools for rapid query development, collaboration, and schema design. It enables faster, more reliable, and more intelligent query execution by layering in support for directives like `@defer` and entity types. GraphOS Cloud has built-in support for Apollo Federation, allowing easy scaling across teams with subgraphs, and integrates with a delivery pipeline to prevent breaking changes when collaborating on a graph with multiple subgraphs and client apps. The platform is available as a free Serverless plan with 10 million operations per month, and users can pay as they go for additional operations.

The Apollo Changelog for March 6, 2023, highlights several key updates, including the sharing of details about Apollo's monorepo by engineer Ryan Wilcox, a new blog post on handling null in Kotlin clients, and an announcement that GraphQL Yoga, GraphQL Helix, and NestJS have been validated to support the `@composeDirective` and `@interfaceObject` directives. Additionally, the changelog mentions updates to Apollo Client, Rover, and Apollo Router, as well as a community spotlight featuring Volvo's blog series about their adventures with Apollo Federation. The summary also notes that new GraphQL Summit talk summaries have been released on the Apollo YouTube channel.