November 2023 Summaries

Apollo Client Office Hours with Alessia Bellisario was a discussion between Jeff Auriemma and Alessia Bellisario, Apollo Maintainer. They talked about the release process of Apollo Client, using changesets for automation and their benefits in improving velocity. They also discussed snapshot releases and how they help with quick testing of fixes. Additionally, they touched on the defer directive, which allows developers to deferring fields that don't need to be fetched initially, reducing network requests. The team is working towards adding more features like suspenseful testing approaches and non-reactive directives. Alessia will be speaking at GraphQL Summit and React Advanced, and Jeff will be giving a lightning talk about GraphQL at Lead Dev West Coast. They also mentioned the importance of schema-driven testing approaches and encouraged folks to reach out on the Apollo Client GitHub or Discord.

The Apollo Router is a replacement for the Gateway, providing higher performance with lower resource consumption. It leverages the experience and knowledge of Apollo to provide a performant, scalable GraphQL Federation experience while still offering customization to users. Migrating from gateway to router requires a mindset shift, as the router is a product that provides standard configuration-driven execution environment. The team upgraded their fleet of Apollo Gateway instances to the Apollo Router with positive results, including substantial operational cost-saving reductions in CPU and memory consumption. The router provides higher performance, lower resource consumption, and improved responsiveness compared to the gateway. The team also leveraged Kubernetes features such as Helm, pod disruption budgets, affinities, and autoscaling to manage deployments and optimize resources. Overall, the Apollo Router offers a scalable, customizable, and performant GraphQL Federation experience for users.