January 2024 Summaries

Apollo Client 3.9 has introduced several new features and improvements, including suspense-enabled data fetching in response to user interaction with `useLoadableQuery`, preloading data outside of React with `createQueryPreloader` and `preloadQuery`, memory usage optimizations, a new `useQueryRefHandlers` hook for accessing `refetch` and `fetchMore` functions, multipart subscriptions network adapters for Relay and urql, and improvements to the testing utility `MockedProvider`. These updates aim to provide performance benefits and enhance developer productivity.

The Apollo iOS project restructured its libraries into separate smaller repositories that can be provided as their own Swift Package Manager (SPM) packages, while maintaining an efficient development workflow. To achieve this, they used Git subtree functionality instead of git submodules, which allows pulling all the code of a repository into another repository from a specific reference, enabling independent work on each subtree while still being able to push changes back to their remote repositories. This approach provides concise SPM packages for features, independently versioned feature packages, and an easy development workflow that allows developers to work together but distribute separately.

Intuit, a leading provider of accounting software, migrated to a single supergraph powered by Apollo GraphOS to improve performance under high traffic and ensure compliance with industry standards. The company's API platform team chose Apollo Router as the GraphQL orchestrator due to its excellent scalability results from benchmarking. This transition has empowered self-service, streamlined supergraph management, and optimized performance during critical periods, such as tax season. By adopting a unified gateway and leveraging Apollo GraphOS contracts, Intuit was able to deliver different subsets of their supergraph to different consumers, fostering versatility and adaptability within the system. The company's experience highlights the importance of selecting the right tools, adapting to evolving needs, and prioritizing observability for early detection and recovery from issues.

The newly released GraphOS Platform APIs enable blue-green and canary deployments, allowing organizations to streamline their integration with immutable workflows. These enhanced APIs provide a versatile solution for deployment strategies, supporting both blue-green and canary releases. The new features include PublishSubgraphsMutation, PollLaunchStatusQuery, and FetchSupergraphSDLQuery, which allow teams to publish subgraphs as a single unit, poll for launch status, and fetch supergraph schema of the launch. With these updates, platform teams can enhance their GraphQL platform stance and deploy with greater flexibility, while also ensuring compatibility with existing workflows that rely on immutable schemas.

The Apollo Supergraph Architecture Framework (SAF) is a tool designed to help organizations build and manage scalable and effective enterprise supergraphs. The framework provides key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for running a supergraph in production, with five pillars that provide an ideal foundation for a supergraph: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance, and Developer Efficiency. The SAF is a short assessment that helps organizations understand how to improve their supergraph, providing a report of performance, action items, and their associated impact and level of effort, which can be exported as a PDF. The framework aims to simplify the process for existing and new GraphQL practitioners, leveraging Apollo's experience and best practices from other companies' learnings.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that has gained popularity and is poised to shape the future of how developers interact with data. GraphQL offers a powerful solution to many challenges faced by developers when working with traditional REST APIs, including self-documenting APIs, precise data fetching, and easier versioning. It also enables platform engineering efforts by providing composable APIs, efficient data coordination, and centralized governance. Additionally, GraphQL allows for seamless scaling of API efforts, enabling organizations to scale development efforts horizontally and reducing bottlenecks and accelerating feature delivery. With its benefits in enhancing developer portals, simplifying platform engineering efforts, and enabling seamless scalability, GraphQL is transforming the way developers work with APIs and is poised to become the future of APIs.

Apollo GraphQL has made significant additions to its leadership team, welcoming Aditya Phadke as Chief Customer Officer and Rob Brazier as VP of Product. These new appointments build on the successes felt in 2023, as GraphQL saw a rise in usage and success within API platform teams for globally recognized brands like Netflix, Wayfair, and Intuit. Apollo GraphQL provides an API integration layer across teams with its supergraph – a GraphQL layer that sits atop existing APIs and enables developers to fetch data from a single endpoint. The company has experienced 40% growth in new customers, with significant customers including Ford Credit, Sony Playstation, and Realtor.com. Apollo GraphQL's product portfolio and services now include real-time data at scale, comprehensive platform approach to API Security, API conformance and governance, significant performance gains, and official support for Microsoft .NET. The company has received recognition by third-party research firms and saw significant growth in its vibrant community, including being named a GraphQL API Sample Vendor for 3 consecutive years in the Gartner Hype Cycle for APIs.

GraphQL is a specification and query language that defines how to query, mutate, and subscribe to data within a graph, empowering client developers to build features faster by allowing them to fetch data, make changes or create data, and receive real-time updates by specifying the exact fields they need. Unlike traditional REST APIs, GraphQL can coexist harmoniously with REST and is often used to enhance existing REST APIs, providing flexibility and improved developer experience. Implementing GraphQL over APIs offers a unified view of usage and performance, accelerating application development, expanding capabilities, improving user experience, and simplifying data access for client developers. By leveraging GraphQL in platform engineering efforts, organizations can modernize their APIs and provide delightful user experiences, while the adoption of the Apollo Router further elevates the capabilities of GraphQL-based ecosystems with features like language agnosticism, scalability, observability, real-time support, efficient query execution, security, and advanced features such as the `@defer` directive.